Ample space to roam?

At Whole Foods this week, I passed by the butcher counter and noticed again the sign, “with ample space to roam” that refers to their chickens. It reminded me of Rosie, the Whole Foods “naturally raised” chicken that Michael Pollan buys and eats in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and whose “farm” he visits.

The organic broiler Pollan picked up had a name, Rosie, and her packaging said she was a “sustainably farmed,” “free-range chicken” from Petaluma Poultry, a company that uses farming methods that “strive to create harmonious relationships in nature, sustaining the health of all creatures and the natural world.”

Pollan describes Whole Foods’ marketing as resembling a “pastoral narrative in which farm animals live much as they did in the books we read as children.”

When Pollan follows Rosie to her organic chicken farm, he observes that her farm is “more animal factory than farm.”  Rosie lived in a shed with 20,000 other Rosies, and aside from the organic feed, didn’t appear to live any differently than any other industrial chicken.

The “free-range” component he exposes as a myth: while there is a little door leading out to a grassy yard, the door remains shut until the birds are five to six weeks old for health reasons and then the birds are slaughtered just two weeks later.

So how does this organic chicken “farm” differ from the standard broiler factory farm in terms of animal welfare? The birds are a Cornish Cross, a triumph of industrial breeding in that growth is so rapid they reach killing size in seven weeks, although “their poor legs cannot keep pace, and frequently fail.”  Pollan was told that compared to conventional chickens, these birds have it pretty good as they get a few more square inches of living space per bird, “though it was hard to see how they could be packed together much more tightly,” and, because they don’t get hormones or antibiotics in their feed, they live a few more days. “Though under the circumstances, it’s not clear that a longer life is necessarily a boon.”

Lastly, the chicken houses don’t look like something on a farm, but rather more like military barracks: a dozen long sheds with giant fans at each end and smelling powerfully of ammonia, with high humidity.

Once Pollan stepped outside, he waited by the chicken door to see if any of the birds would stroll down the ramp to their grassy yard. And he waited. He had to conclude that Rosie doesn’t really get the whole free-range concept. With her food and water indoors and her entire life having been spent in a factory environment, it doesn’t occur to her to head on out during the last two weeks of her brief life to freely range.

Pollan writes that the space provided outdoors is not unlike the typical American front lawn it resembled. It’s a ritual space, not really for use by local residents, but a “symbolic offering to the larger community.”

“Seldom if ever stepped upon, the chicken-house lawn is scrupulously maintained nevertheless, to honor an ideal nobody wants to admit has by now become something of a joke, an empty pastoral conceit.”

Links of interest:
Meet Rosie
http://www.petalumapoultry.com/

Information about the poultry industry