McDonalds is the first fast food retailer – in fact the first large commercial business in New Zealand – to commit to using free range eggs in 19 of its restaurants in New Zealand.

You just know its all part of McDonald’s re-branding exercise, a cunning plan to try to shed their nasty ‘junk food’ image and reposition themselves as a more serious, credible, caring food outlet.

But hey, they are the first fast food company to do it. So whatever their motivation, congratulations! It will have the effect of sparing about 7 thousand (out of 3 million) hens from living their short and tragic lives inside a cage. And if other fast food companies join in, it could have the effect of phasing out demand for cruel, battery raised eggs altogether.

I know SAFE has been trying for years to persuade restaurants and food businesses to convert to using free range eggs, but most businesses have resisted their call, putting profitability ahead of principle.

So it’s great that McDonalds has decided to take the plunge, and hopefully others will follow. We certainly hope McDonalds will extend its decision to other stores outside of Christchurch and Dunedin. And we hope it will give a big boost to free range egg production, as well.

Speaking of free range egg production, its time we had some statutory guidelines about what actually constitutes a ‘free range’ egg. I have been told there are some companies which use the free range label, but you and I wouldn’t consider their farms to be free range at all.

So to protect consumers and ensure the word free range isn’t being abused, its time the Commerce Commission or the Ministry of Consumer Affairs took the lead and developed clear guidelines for the industry, and for what practices may, or may not, be deemed to be free range.

The survey results are not due to be released until November, but industry sources told the Sunday Star-Times that early findings show that battery-farmed birds are generally healthier [than free range chickens] because the controlled conditions prevent the spread of disease. This was despite both groups receiving the same level of care.

I’m not disputing the findings.  It won’t change my dietary habits. The animal rights issues for caged is enough is enough to put me off them.  (Although health is obviously an important animal rights issue too.) I do wonder though if the battery hens healthiness stems from their routine exposure to antibiotics and lack of exposure to anything in the outside would.  If you live a drugged and hermetically sealed life you’d probably be reasonably healthy too – at least according to some measurements.

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan talks about Rosie the free range chicken (I’ve tangentially segued into broiler chickens rather than egg laying ones here for a moment):

I also visited Rosie the organic chicken at her farm in Petaluma, which turns out to be more animal factory than farm. She lives in a shed with twenty thousand other Rosie’s, who, aside from their certified organic feed, live lives little different from that of any other industrial chicken. Ah, but what about the “free-range” lifestyle promised on the label? True, there’s a little door in the shed leading out to a narrow grassy yard. But the free-range story seems a bit of a stretch when you discover that the door remains firmly shut until the birds are at least five or six weeks old—for fear they’ll catch something outside—and the chickens are slaughtered only two weeks later.

Pollan terms this type of food ‘the supermarket pastoral’.  Because it says ‘organic’ on the label we imagine happy chickens pecking away in long grass, perhaps with a farmer in a black singlet singing country and western songs to them while he or she collects eggs.

The question this survey raises is what happens when chickens get a halfway life – neither the false ideal that now exists only on small, local farms, nor the drugs and lack of exposure to diseases out in the real world?