McDonald’s is slowly transitioning to cage-free eggs, but
that’s only a slightly better deal for the chickens.
McDonald’s made headlines recently by announcing it will transition to cage-free eggs by 2025. Hooray: You can feel better about eating that Egg McMuffin.
Or at least you can a decade
from now. Less than 1 percent of the fast food giant’s eggs
currently come from cage-free chickens.
Nonetheless, the Humane Society of the United States heralds the move as
“a watershed moment for animal welfare.”
Well, maybe.
I have a hard time getting too
excited over changes like this. To be sure, cage-free is better than caged.
Laying hens in battery cages live a miserable existence, in which each bird is
crammed into less than the space of a piece of paper. Cage-free hens can at
least stretch their wings and move around.
Chickens are curious, social
animals that love the outdoors. They love scratching and pecking for bugs and foraging
for other tasty morsels like seeds and grasses. Watch any outdoor flock and
you’ll see birds resting in the shade of a tree while others blissfully take
dirt baths.
Dirt baths are a hygienic
behavior that clean the birds’ feathers and eliminate parasites, but the
chickens seem to really enjoy them as well.
Listen as you watch a flock of
chickens and you’ll hear a wide variety of vocalizations. There’s one cluck that a
mother hen uses to tell chicks she’s found them a treat, others that alert of a
predator’s presence, and another to announce that a hen has laid an egg.
Backyard chicken owners are
often amazed at how each individual hen has a unique personality. And the
pecking order? That’s a real thing.
Which is a large part of why
even cage-free facilities, where there’s still no space for natural exploring
and socializing, aren’t Chicken Disneyland.
When chickens are stressed — as
they are, for example, in overcrowded indoor laying facilities of both the
caged and cage-free varieties — they peck one another. Sometimes to death.
The egg industry handles this by
painfully removing the tips of each hen’s beak so that her pecks will be less
lethal. Getting rid of the cages alone won’t put an end to “debeaking.”
I haven’t crunched the numbers
on egg economics, but eggs are so cheap in the United States that I can’t
imagine any farmer profitably raising hens outdoors in a true Chicken
Disneyland while selling eggs wholesale at prices McDonald’s would pay.
Studies have shown that eggs
from chickens raised in outdoor pastures are healthier than the typical eggs
sold in the store, but McDonald’s track record shows it isn’t terribly concerned
about the healthiness of its fare.
My personal solution has been to
raise my own small flock of backyard chickens, or to buy eggs from others who
do — finding eggs from chickens raised “on pasture” is key. But buying eggs at
farms or at farmers’ markets isn’t a viable option for many Americans. And it
certainly isn’t a likely choice for a company like McDonald’s.
So what should be done? There’s
no easy solution in sight, save for cutting back on fast food. In the meantime,
let’s not congratulate McDonald’s too much on a change to slightly less bad
eggs that it promises to complete a decade from now.
OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe
for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. OtherWords.org.
