Tag Archives: Cage-free

$250K fine in Australia for fake ‘free range’ eggs

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In addition to changing Prime Ministers every 12 months (bye-bye Tony dumb-dumb) it’s almost impossible to buy cage eggs, at least without enduring the stigmatizing stares of other shoppers.

darling.down.eggsBut are consumers getting what’s advertised?

Darling Downs Fresh Eggs must pay a $250,000 fine after the Federal Court ruled it had purposely mis-labelled its eggs as free range, in a case brought by the competition watchdog.

The court found that RL Adams Pty, the company behind the egg producer, engaged in misleading conduct and made misleading representations to consumers in labelling and promoting its eggs as `free range’ from December 2013 to October 2014.

The company admitted, in the course of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission investigation, that it had kept its hens confined to barns at all times, and kept doors shut so the chickens never had access to an outdoor range.

“It’s clearly misleading to claim your eggs are free range when the hens that laid the eggs didn’t roam freely outdoors,” said ACCC chairman Rod Sims.

“People are willing to pay a premium for free range eggs which they believe meet ethical or welfare standards. Businesses should not be benefiting financially from misleading claims about farming practices,” he said.

The severity of the penalty was mitigated in part by Rl Adams’ co-operation with the ACCC investigation, said the court.

How safe are free-range eggs?

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Years ago – before we moved here and put a dog inside – the shed out back was a chicken coop. These were the original backyard chickens. A resurgence of small-flock rearing has led many to wonder (and make assumptions) about the safety of free-range eggs.

Joel Keehn wrote on Consumer Reports’ Health blog this weekend that,

"About a year ago I took my 11-year-old daughter to the emergency room with what turned out to be salmonella poisoning. My first thought when I heard the diagnosis: Did she pick up the infection from our flock of chickens? But the public-health outreach worker at the local department of health said that was unlikely.

"While eggs are indeed a leading cause of salmonella poisoning, the bacteria that causes the infection may be more likely to breed in the cramped confines of factory farms than in free-range, backyard chicken runs like ours."

Oh? That’s an interesting assumption. And Keehn doesn’t provide anything to support it.

As far as I can tell, salmonella contamination of eggs from various farming methods has not been well-researched…save for one study rumored in January 2008 to have been conducted by the UK government that "showed that 23.4 per cent of farms with caged [egg-laying] hens tested positive for salmonella compared to 4.4 per cent in organic flocks and 6.5 per cent in free-range flocks."

The closest thing I could find was a report by the UK Food Standards Agency in March 2004 of testing results of 4,753 containers of six eggs each (with 16.9% from free-range production systems) that found "no statistically significant difference…between the prevalence of salmonella contamination in samples from different egg production types."

Keehn’s blog post concluded by saying,

"By the way, the health department official who called me up said the most likely source of my daughter’s salmonella poisoning was our pet turtle. That critter is now gone. But I’m picking up four new hens from my neighbor down the road later this week."

I have no reason to believe their eggs will be any safer than those of caged hens. Keehn’s reason is not good enough.

Score 1 for food safety

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Buried in a N.Y. Times piece on the demand for cage-free eggs is this nugget that Ben found while editing AnimalNet tonight:

"Officials at Notre Dame turned down a request by a campus animal rights group to switch to cage-free eggs after investigating the issue for six months.

The university, which serves 16,000 meals a day in its dining halls, visited both cage and cage-free operations, examining animal welfare, food safety, environmental impact, taste and other issues. Both operations they toured appeared to take equally good care of their chickens, said Jocie Antonelli, nutrition and safety manager.

The university decided that its current source of eggs, which uses a cage system, had the edge in food safety.

“There are pros and cons to each system,” Ms. Antonelli said. “Either way, these are not free-roaming chickens living out in a pasture.”

The story does not explain what constituted the edge in food safety, but the mere mention of food safety – microbial food safety – is encouraging.