Remember Chicken Little’s panicked cry ‘The Sky is Falling!”? What, then, should we make of Big Chicken‘s getting all bent out of shape?
In this case, “Big Chicken” is what some of us ‘organic‘ types refer to as the industrialized egg and chicken producing lobby, usually represented the United Egg Producers (UEP).
Yup, there’s a Chicken lobby. In fact, every agricultural commodity has some industrial-oriented trade group fighting for their interests. As Orwellian as it may sound, farmers are actually required to belong and pay into these groups. More often than not, the issues for which they fight represent such old-favorites as genetic engineering, expanded pesticide use and related largely-outdated paradigms.
Usually, however, the big guys just ignore us, but something recently got their feathers all ruffled up. Last week, UEP issued a press release in which their president, Gene Gregory, certainly has his gander up: “despite pressure and bullying tactics[by some animal welfare groups, the] overwhelming majority of American consumers continue to prefer regular eggs from modern cage housing systems rather than cage-free.” (thanks to SustainableFoodNews.com for calling attention to this release!)
They’re alluding to the work of Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) – pesky activists – who’ve been successfully working with some of America’s biggest restaurant and retail chains to meet consumer demand for cage-free eggs – brands including Burger King, Subway, Wendy’s and Carl’s Jr. - pretty mainstream ‘American Consumer‘, right?
Apparently, the folks at UEP aren’t paying attention to even one of their most conservative allies, the American Farm Bureau, whose own research shows that a full 95% ‘of Americans believe that farm animals should be well-cared for.’ Personally, I’m surprised the AFB didn’t suppress those findings … in their shoes, I might have!
Anyways, whatever got UEP and their media folks’ peckin’, it may well be premature to … count them chickens … meaning, the end of the confined chicken industry. While there’s absolutely no doubt that cage free chickens and eggs are well on their way to becoming the ‘norm’, Big Chicken represents big business interests, with a lot of entrenched interests, money and related political clout. Too, a conversion of that scale will take years, a lot of capital investment, and significant commitments by corporate customers. Besides which, underneath all the bluster, there are a few real issues – legitimate, substantive, and complex – to be resolved, such as the role of cheap food in our economy.
I, however, am encouraged by Big Chicken’s initial … squawks …. about the sky falling on their factory-farming empire. It means they’re paying attention, and that means that consumers’ voices are, in fact, being heard very, very loudly.
