Rant: “100% Vegetarian Fed Chicken”

Have you ever seen this advertised? Sometimes found on organic chicken meat or eggs, this slogan is proudly displayed on packaging alongside other pleasant descriptors like “natural”, “organic”, and “free-range”. You would think that chicken farmers would know that chickens are in fact NOT vegetarians. Chickens are omnivores like us. Their natural diet includes grasses, legumes, vegetables, and fruit but it also includes things like insects, worms, and mice. On two occasions, the wife and I have even witnessed our chickens eating small snakes. These little dinosaurs will eat just about any animal they are physically capable of pecking apart or slurping down whole.

So what happens when chickens (or other omnivorous poultry like ducks and turkeys) are denied a large part of their natural diet? Well, unsurprisingly, they become unhealthy. These sickly birds leave farmers with a few choices: 1. Slaughter the birds before they die of illness. 2. Medicate the birds. 3. Try to supplement the food with all of the critical nutrients denied by the unnatural diet.

1. Slaughter the Birds

The problem with this approach is that the animal is unhealthy and malnourished. What happens when the food that we eat is malnourished? We become malnourished.

2. Medicate the Birds

This has the same problems as the previous option but with the added benefit of tainting your food with unnecessary medications. Yum! To steal a line from Joel Salatin, “Our animals don’t do drugs!” Jokes aside, we would provide medication to a sick animal of ours to save its life but it would be in a very targeted approach, not broadcast in preventative fashion like must be done in CAFOs (Consentrated Animal Feeding Operation). We also would not breed animals that required the crutch of medications to survive.

3. Supplement the Birds

There’s nothing wrong with supplementing an incomplete diet; however, why is this necessary when the chickens could simply be allowed to eat bugs? Can these farmers really supplement all of the micro-nutrients denied to the birds by their unnatural diet? Probably not.

In some ways, I appreciate this kind of advertising. When found within the collage of “natural”, “organic”, and “free-range” claims painted across rosy pictures of quintessential barns, “100% Vegetarian Fed” is probably the most honest. At Apollo Acres, our herbivores eat an herbivorous diet and our omnivores eat an omnivorous diet. The quality difference in these two approaches is most noticeable in eggs. Our eggs look better, feel better, taste better, and are better for you than vegetarian fed eggs. Come by the market sometime and try them for yourself.

Healthy Apollo Acres egg [Left]. Sickly vegetarian fed egg [Right].

Though you may have learned something new today, it probably didn’t take long to understand why feeding chickens a vegetarian diet is a bad practice or at least why it is not something to brag about. So why do they do it? Are they stupid? Do they think YOU are stupid? Are you ready for me to stop asking rhetorical questions? Too bad because there will probably be more in the next post.