the industry prevent it? Not by giving the hens more room, which would be the humane response. Instead, they cut off a sizable part of the hens’ beaks—a process known euphemistically as “beak trimming.”
What's a concerned consumer to do? Fortunately, the Cornucopia Institute has come out with an Organic Egg Scorecard that empowers consumers with accurate information. The scorecard rates companies that sell name-brand and private-label organic eggs against the criteria that are most important to the majority of conscientious consumers.
There are two things the Organic Egg Scorecard quickly makes apparent.
The first is that just because eggs are “organic” doesn't mean they are humanely raised. In fact, there are “organic” factory-farm operations with more than 80,000 “organic” hens in a single building.
The second thing the Organic Egg Scorecard reveals is exactly which brands of eggs found in your local stores are produced using the best organic practices and with the most ethical regard for the hens. If you are interested in which eggs are sustainable and humane and which are not, check it out.
The results may surprise you. For example, the private label brands sold by Trader Joe's, Safeway OOrganics, Walmart's Great Value, and Costco's Kirkland Signature get the lowest possible rating because these companies were unable or unwilling to provide any meaningful information about how their chickens are housed, fed, or treated. Unfortunately, the Cornucopia Institute reports, “the vast majority of organic eggs for private label brands are produced on industrial farms that house hundreds of thousands of birds and do not grant the birds meaningful outdoor access.”
Many egg suppliers tout that their eggs are produced without hormones. That sounds great but is, in fact, meaningless because, unlike beef and dairy products, no eggs produced in the U.S. today are legally produced with hormones. Federal regulations prohibit the use of hormones in raising poultry.
Whole Foods, at least, has taken a step in the right direction by not selling any eggs that come from hens whose beaks have been “trimmed.” Whole Foods shoppers can take some comfort in knowing that eggs bought there do not come from the worst of the nation's egg factories.
If you want to consume eggs from healthy and happy hens, you may want to take a step in the direction of food self-reliance and keep a few hens in your backyard. Or get your eggs from a neighbor or from a small-scale farm you can actually visit. Or purchase only eggs that are highly rated by the Organic Egg Scorecard.
Personally, my favorite breakfast is guaranteed to be cruelty-free. It's oatmeal with cinnamon, raisins, and walnuts, which aren't added only for flavor. Oats are a comparatively low-glycemic-index grain to begin with, but the addition of walnuts creates a nourishing breakfast with high protein content, high nutrient density, a healthy form of fat, and a very low glycemic index.
Here's my recipe for a tasty and hearty breakfast that will provide you with consistent blood sugar levels, and give you plenty of energy all morning. Serves three.
1 cup rolled oats
3 cups water
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/3 cup raisins
1/3 cup walnuts
1 Place oats, water, salt, cinnamon, and raisins in a covered saucepan and bring to a boil.
2 Turn down heat and simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
3 Remove from heat, stir in walnuts, and serve hot.
3
No Such Thing as Happy Cows
As THE ONLY SON OF THE FOUNDER of the Baskin-Robbins ice cream empire, I grew up eating plenty of ice cream and being groomed to take over the family business. It was painful for me to face the fact that the sale and consumption of ice cream was contributing to rising rates of heart disease and obesity. And it was even more painful to learn that ice cream was made from milk that was produced at the cost of tremendous suffering for the dairy cows and their calves. Instead of following in my father's footsteps, I turned away from the family business and committed myself to working for a more compassionate and healthy world.
In my books, including Diet for a New America and The Food Revolution, I detail the horrific abuses suffered by animals like dairy cows and their calves in large-scale animal operations. These books have become international bestsellers, which has reinforced my belief that these are issues of importance to an increasing number of people.
In 2010, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill that prohibits any egg from being sold in the state that comes from caged hens; the bill takes effect in 2015. This bill became law twenty months after a 63 percent majority of California voters approved Proposition 2, the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act, which made it clear that concern for the living conditions of livestock is no longer the province of animal rights activists alone.
Recognizing that concern about the humane treatment of farm animals has been growing, the California Milk Advisory Board proceeded to ramp up its ten-year “Happy Cow” advertising campaign with a new series of ads proclaiming: “Great milk comes from Happy Cows. Happy Cows come from California.” These ads are now being shown across the nation.
Unfortunately, there are a few problems with the ads. For one, they aren't always 100 percent loyal to the truth. As an example, they weren't filmed in California at all. They were filmed in Auckland, New Zealand.
Unfortunately, that's just the tip of the iceberg.
The California Milk Board has suffused the state with billboards and other ads proudly proclaiming that 99 percent of the state's dairy farms are family owned. But in order to arrive at this figure, they include each and every rural household in the state that happens to have one or two cows, and calls each of them a dairy farm. In this calculation, each of these households is counted as a single dairy farm and given the same weight as a corporate-owned dairy in the San Joaquin Valley that has 20,000 cows. Consumers reading the billboards and other ads may think that most of the state's milk comes from family farms when, in fact, 95 percent of the milk produced in the state comes from large corporate dairies.
Thanks to the practices these corporate dairies employ, the amount of milk produced yearly by the average California cow is nearly 3,000 pounds more than the national average. This increased production may seem like a good thing, but it is achieved at great cost to the animals. The cows are routinely confined in extremely unnatural conditions, injected with hormones, fed antibiotics, and in general treated without compassion like four-legged milk pumps. The ads portray California's cows as happy when, in actuality, one third of California's cows suffer from painful udder infections, and more than half suffer from other infections and illnesses.
The natural lifespan of a dairy cow is about twenty years, but California's dairy cows are typically slaughtered when they are four or five years old, because they've become crippled from painful foot infections or calcium depletion, or simply because they can no longer produce the unnaturally high amounts of milk required of them.
It's hard to see how the life of the average California cow today could legitimately be considered to be a happy one, which raises a few questions. Are we going to hold our advertisers accountable to reality? Are we going to ask that what they tell us
