How Free Is Free?
Purchasing products labelled as "free range" may be giving you a false sense of them being the healthier choice over those that do not bear the free range designation. We are slowly being trained, well, you could almost approach the term "brainwashed," into believing that purchasing free range products such as eggs or chickens are obviously the healthier choice. Why not? It sounds like it is a more natural, humane alternative to the way that we have in our minds eye of the way caged farm animals are kept.
We hear "free range" and instantly think of the animals roaming through lush, green fields, laying in the sun and feasting on grass and their natural foods - not kept in cages in barns and eating bagged feeds. How absolutely naive we are! That picture is far from the reality, in fact, in most cases, the animals are subject to the same standards as their non-free range relatives.
According to the USDA definition of "free range", it states verbatim and in it's entirety that "producers must demonstrate to the agency that the poultry has been allowed access to the outside." Not much of an all-encompassing definition is that? Let's consider a 25,000 square foot barn with a single opening at one end which is just large enough for a single chicken at a time to pass through. How many birds could actually take advantage of having access to the outdoors during the course of a day? How many of them would even realize that there even IS a door to go through? After all, they are not led outside - the door is simply left open.
The definition does not require that they actually go outside, but only that they have access. This was confirmed through a telephone call that I placed to the regulatory agency governing the law. They stated that a producer can put in an opening to the outside, leave that door open for 5 minutes a day and voila', the criteria for being free range is fulfilled and "free range" can now be stamped on their products. Of course, with a free range designate on their products, the cost to the consumer goes up accordingly. That in itself gives us the impression that it must be the healthier choice. Natural products are more commonly more expensive than non-natural products. One only has to look at "organic" foods to realize that!
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