Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the supermarket, another food manufacturer has decided to slap a misleading claim on its products. This time it’s Perdue, the country’s third largest chicken producer, which has started touting its a natural chicken products as “humanely raised.” But, according to the Animal Welfare Institute, this chicken is grown pretty much the same way most conventional chicken is — that is to say in large, dimly-lit, horribly smelly and crowded barns.
The new packaging for natural Perdue chicken, which the company started rolling out in February, also makes the claim that the chickens were “raised cage free” — a hollow assertion since the caging of so-called broiler chickens is not actually an issue. That would be caged egg-laying hens. Thus the “cage free” claim has all the meaning of a declaration that the chickens were not genetically modified or not allowed to breed with feral cats. But it nonetheless gives consumers the impression that Perdue’s chickens are of particularly high quality and different from the norm.
That, however, doesn’t appear to be the case. Perdue is basing its humanely raised claim on the National Chicken Council’s animal welfare guidelines, industry-created standards that the Animal Welfare Institute and other groups have taken issue with since they were created back in 2005. This is the first time any chicken producer has attempted to use the humane label.
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