Humanely raised chicken

Recently, I was speaking with Andrea LeTard, a fantastic local chef and food blogger at Andrea’s Cooktales. She was telling me about how she vowed to only eat meat that she knew where it came from and that it was raised humanely.  We discussed how difficult it can be to find humanely raised chicken, especially in the Memphis area.

I hear this a lot from our customers and I decided it was time to dig a little deeper.  As Andrea and I discussed that day and as I’ve written about before, even “free range” and “organic” chicken from the supermarket is not exempt.  When large companies are producing millions of chickens, the decency of the chicken goes right out the window. The vast majority of chicken consumed in America is raised in shameful conditions.

I often extol the benefits of chickens living on pasture, which there are many, but I think it’s important to take a moment and simply think about the being that is the chicken.  Joel Salatin often talks about “the chickenness of the chicken” or “the pigness of the pig”. I believe there is great wisdom in those words. The chicken will act like a chicken so long as we let it. How can we consider ourselves a moral people if we subject animals to the kinds of conditions that factory farming creates?

As you can see in the picture above, there is quite the contrast in factory farming vs the way we raise chickens.  Chickens raised in factory farms are a commodity; they are manipulated in any way the puppet master may see fit. Chickens raised on our farm are treated as living, breathing animals from start to finish.  As a society, the way we treat animals that are under our management says a lot about who we are. I hope that you will choose to support ethical, humane farming and kick factory farming to the curb.