What Nobody Tells You About Supermarket Chicken
Some thoughts on "pastured" poultry
I had a story in the Wall Street Journal last week about how to navigate today’s increasingly crowded grocery store poultry aisles, spot misleading marketing, and walk away with a bird you can feel good about (if you don’t subscribe to the Journal, please help yourself to this gift link to read it for free).
I spent a lot of time over the past two months talking to chicken farmers, processors, scientists, and other poultry experts, and as anyone who has had the misfortune of standing next to me recently on the sidelines of a soccer game knows, this story really only scratches the surface of all there is to say about CHICKEN, and how easy it is to be misled when you’re buying it.
Jane and I are planning to create a chicken buying guide for you folks that goes deep, deep into the matter. And, if you actually don’t care what the specific differences are between American Humane Certified and Certified Humane, we’ll tell you right up top which chicken brands are best.
For those of you who just can’t wait…
The thing I was most struck by in my reporting was how very few broilers (that is, somewhat incredibly, the official industry term for the chickens we raise for meat) actually live, Big Red Barn style, clucking and pecking around a barnyard. Most people know by now that fast food chicken, and the chicken you buy on a yellow Styrofoam tray with a VALUE PACK sticker on it? Those chickens tend to live in pretty miserable conditions.
But it turns out even chickens labeled free-range and pasture-raised might spend most of their time inside. The legal definitions of these terms, by the USDA, are far looser than you’d think, only requiring companies to show evidence that the birds have “access” to the outdoors.
Chickens can have a perfectly comfortable life indoors, if the barns are clean and spacious, and they’re given good food and clean water. However: there’s a growing body of evidence showing that birds that, as one farmer put it to me, “hop, run, pick, forage, and dust bathe” for the majority of their lives on pasture, do produce healthier meat than their indoor counterparts.
Data collected by Pasturebird, a small brand that raises its chickens in mobile coops, a la Joel Salatin – the farmer made famous by The Omnivore’s Dilemma – has shown their chickens have three times the Omega 3 fatty acids, 50 percent more vitamin A and E, 21 percent less saturated fat, and a host of micro-nutrient differences compared to standard chickens. Another major benefit of rotating chickens on pasture instead of keeping them in big poultry houses is they improve the soil they’re raised on by fertilizing it.
Pasture-raised is a term you see all over the place these days on chicken packaging, but in all my research, I did not find a national grocery brand that actually raised its chickens on pasture for the majority of their lives.
But! If you are willing to order meat online, you can get truly pastured chicken from Pasturebird. If you are willing to order meat online *and* subscribe *and* price is no object, a Texas-based outfit called Greener Pastures sells pastured chicken that is also Regenerative Organic Certified, Certified Humane, Real Organic Certified, the works. This is the platinum option.
Lastly, the American Pastured Poultry Association has created a website called Get Real Chicken to connect consumers to real pastured poultry operations in their area. Often buying from a local farm involves visiting a farmer’s market, but some of these operations have online sales, or offer their products through smaller regional grocers. If you’re willing to do the extra legwork, this is a great way to buy.
More chicken news you can use is …coming soon!