Care of Scoop:
Two of New Zealand’s largest battery hen producers have bowed to pressure from animal advocacy organisation SAFE following calls for mandatory labelling of egg cartons, and say they will label their battery eggs…
Good. About time.
Battery farming of hens is one of the most depressing examples of animal abuse in the name of increased profit, and the fact that it has taken this long and this much campaigning to even get eggs labelled effectively is a sad indictment of industry practices.
Of course, for corporate industry, the profit motive trumps all else, and it can be no other way. Profit is what companies are for. The only real check on the profit motive comes from consumer ability to make informed purchasing choices. For this reason, food and produce labelling continues to be a massively important battleground. At stake isn’t just animal welfare, but every aspect of food production in our society, and the attendant impact on our health and well-being.
There is no good excuse for opposition to effective labelling. Companies fight it solely because they know their customers would be unhappy if they were better informed.
My unscientific impressions from travelling are that New Zealand is well behind the rest of the developed world in terms of food labelling. I hope this development is a sign of pending improvement.
6 thoughts on “Battery Hen Labelling”
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But I just love watching the corporate yoke flow from a freshly cracked battery egg. Please, please don’t take that small pleasure away from me….
Seriously though Morgue, they do it in the U.K and it’s great. Means Mrs Heke always cooks me the good ones!
Over easy,
Matt
I have a funny feeling that here in Canada they haven’t got anywhere near as much labelling as they do back home. I think they’re still in the 80s, with the ambiguous titling of stuff, you know,
“We know that if we put what’s really in here, or where it comes from, no-one will buy it, so we’ll use words like ‘fresh’ eggs to fool the unwary”
So many things about Canada are so far behind.
I’m pretty sure Canada is saddled with a bunch of U.S. labelling restrictions as a result of their close trading links – the U.S. would put huge pressure on Canada not to raise its game simply by promising to refuse to comply, thereby screwing Canada’s economy. And the U.S., of course, is worst of the lot when it comes to labelling. I thought the U.K. was impressively good at it.
(Yum. I like eggs.)
Yeah, that’s pretty much what I figured, although they don’t fall over every time the US looks at them hard, for example, there is a trade ban on Marlboro cigarettes, as Canada has it’s own Marlboro. Still, in the most cases what you say seems true.
In a lot of ways, I don’t give two shits about the welfare of chickens.
However, I have discovered that fre-range organic corn-fed chickens taste much better, as do their eggs. Richer, yummier, tastier, better texture, just plain better. And frankly it makes sense to me that healthier and happier animals make better food.
So mark me down for a big “yes!” for labelling that mass-produced shit. Not for the poor widdle chickens, but for MY STOMACH. Yum!
I get annoyed with the “Farmer Brown” range that, packaging-wise, suggest happy farm chickens – but nowhere on the packaging does it say “free range” or even “spca approved” (which shows up on some barn-laid eggs). I actually don’t buy eggs if I can’t get free range – the supermarket in Karori would sometimes run out. Crofton Downs is a bit better.
It *is* an ethics thing for me, but growing up in the country I also found the shift from eggs-laid-out-the-back to battery eggs made the poor taste (and weak shell) of the latter really obvious. We’d sometimes get eggs from a neighbour whose chickens just wandered round several acres of property – the yolks were nearly orange and the taste was intense and excellent. In comparison, battery eggs almost feel like I’m eating something diseased and substandard :-/.