Suffer the Chickens

Eggs are the best deal in the grocery store.

For $2.50, I can get a carton of 18 eggs and whip up a hearty omelet for six.

You can’t serve peanut butter for that price.

For years, I have marveled at how cheap eggs are, crediting free enterprise for allowing me to enjoy eggs all week for less than a single Starbucks latte.

But of course, it’s not that simple.

Eggs don’t come from old MacDonald’s farm anymore.

They come from giant commercial outfits that are attracting worldwide criticism for their treatment of chickens.

Now, I realize chickens are hard to love. They have beady eyes and they smell bad and they peck each other and they eat worms.

But spend just five minutes reading about their lives on commercial farms, and I’d question your emotional health if their plight didn’t make you a little sick to your stomach.

Some facts:

* Ninety-eight percent of eggs eaten by Americans are laid by factory chickens that live in layered wire cages and stay indoors around the clock.

* Each hen is allotted roughly 67 square inches – less than the surface area of an 8 1/2-by-11-inch sheet of paper.

* The tight quarters stress the hens, which can lead to behavior problems, including excessive pecking. To combat this, the birds’ beaks are trimmed, without anesthesia. Usually, the procedure is done when the hens are chicks, although “therapeutic beak trimming is recommended at any age if an outbreak of cannibalism occurs,” according to the United Egg Producers 2006 Animal Husbandry Guidelines.

Information about commercial egg farms is abundant on the Internet.

But here’s a quick overview by Michael Pollan from his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma:

“The American laying hen spends her brief span of days piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage the floor of which four pages of this book could carpet wall to wall.

“Every natural instinct of the hen is thwarted, leading to a range of behavioral ‘vices’ that can include cannibalizing her cage mates and rubbing her breast against the wire mesh until it is completely bald and bleeding . . .

“When the output of the survivors begins to ebb, the hens will be ‘force-molted’ – starved of food and water and light for several days in order to stimulate a final bout of eggs before their life’s work is done.

“I know, reciting these facts, most of which are drawn from poultry trade magazines, makes me sound like one of the animal people, doesn’t it? I don’t mean to, but this is what can happen to you when . . . you look. And what you see when you look is the cruelty – and the blindness to cruelty – required to produce eggs that can be sold for 79 cents a dozen.”

There you have it.

The good news is you have a choice. You can buy eggs laid by cage-free chickens. You’ll spend twice as much, but we’re only talking a buck or two.

My grocery store has a good selection of free-range eggs, and I have read that Whole Foods and Wild Oats markets now sell only eggs from free-range or cage- free chickens.

(I don’t mean to pick on egg producers. I tried to talk to someone at Inter-American Products in Cincinnati, Ohio, whose phone number was printed on the carton of $1.19 eggs, but I was referred to a PR woman at another company, and I never heard back from her.)

This isn’t just about chickens. Most animals we eat today are raised in compounds where they live short, brutish, miserable lives.

And we’re all co-conspirators to their suffering, because we certainly buy the meat, and we choose not to look and not to ask any questions about the animals’ treatment.

This is a theme of Pollan’s book, which to me was profound. Another is that we’ve so revolutionized our food production with technology and chemicals that most of us don’t have a clue about what we eat.

Pollan also discusses what he calls our national eating disorder. Because we’re such a cultural melting pot, Pollan says we don’t have a single food identity (such as Italy or France), so we go on wacky diets, get diabetes, eat a fifth of our meals in our cars and feed one-third of our children in fast-food places every day.

I’ve never been an “animal rights” person. In fact, I was on the animal-rights enemies list a couple of years ago when I wrote that I’d bought my dog at a pet store.

Consider my consciousness raised.

This week , I was glad to see the huge outpouring of sympathy for Barbaro, the winning steed with the big heart that had to be put down.

But it also makes me question why we’re so selective about the suffering we choose to see, and why we can’t expand our scope.