BuyingPoultry: Verifying What’s on the Label

Browsing the packaging and labels on poultry products at any major grocery store you’ll see pictures of wide open, sunny fields with chickens and turkeys happily roaming on them. You will also see words like “pasture raised,” “natural,” “free range” and “cage free.” It’s a lot to decode. How can we be sure these labels actually depict reality and are not just a marketing ploy?

Unfortunately, we live in a world where these types of labels are largely unregulated. It’s no surprise that chickens and turkeys raised for human consumption usually live in cramped conditions, sometimes with less floor space than a sheet of paper, without access to the outdoors and sunshine, and without any opportunities to express their natural instincts.

Fair Farms is thrilled with the recent launch of BuyingPoultry, a free resource by our friends at Farm Forward that allows consumers like us to get reliable information about how the products we buy are produced and empowers us to purchase products that align with our values.

Farm Forward enables us to check which poultry and egg products in our local grocery store have the best animal welfare ratings. The BuyingPoultry resource not only allows consumers to make more humane purchasing decisions; it also gives us the tools to easily ask our retailers to offer higher-welfare products.

The resource is much needed because the poultry industry is quite large: chickens alone comprise eighty percent of all the animals killed for meat every year in the United States. With reliable information at hand, consumers can send an influential message to the poultry industry about the practices we want to reward with our forks.

Fair Farms is not only concerned with what’s fair to farmers, the environment, and consumers, but also with the welfare of farm animals.

Check out BuyingPoultry today: http://buyingpoultry.com.