25 August 2008
Organic Eggs & Free Range Chicken
It’s very hard to know what you’re buying at the moment, particularly in terms of labels that say “free-range”, “organic”, “added omega-3″, and so on. One thing that has been puzzling me lately is the labelling on poultry - and not just chicken, but also eggs.
The prices certainly indicate something. You can get two white-label chicken breasts in some supermarkets for about 2 euros, sometimes a bit less. The only way that can possibly be economic for the producer is for it to be mutant chicken, raised on a steady diet of steroids in a small box, with ab absolute minimum time to maturity. However, most such products come in around or above a more reasonable 4 euros. But even your 4 euro chicken has no special labels, although it may at least be Irish rather than generic unspecified chicken.
Once you’re looking at free-range chicken, the price will be something in the region of 7 euros for two breast pieces. And if your label says “organic”, well, you’ll be lucky to get it under a tenner, and it’s more likely to be in the region of 12 euros, or even more. Oddly - maybe it’s a processing cost - you can sometimes get a whole organic chicken for not a great deal more. And yet, the organic label doesn’t say whether the chicken was free-range, or just given organic feed. Or does it? Does the chicken have to be free-range before it’s organic?
Some digging into the organic standards applicable in Ireland shows that chickens must be allowed free range over certain standards of ground for particular portions of their lives before they can have the organic label - and that this is true at least all over the EU. If you want to know more than just the word “organic”, you need to go look at the standards bodies, and the regulations they lay down. Organic standards in Ireland are managed by two bodies; the Irish Organic Farmers and Growers Association, Organic Trust Limited, and of course, all of this is under EU Regulation.
Sadly, for eggs, even after reading the various chunks of documentation available, I’m still not sure if “organic”, strictly speaking, includes “free range”. If anyone knows one way or other, please do let me know - I suspect it does, but it’s a pity the documents aren’t clearer.