Free Range Chickens or Segregated Coupe Chickens? (restaurant, fast food, healthier)

[CometVoyager]

Each weekend we visit our local farmers market and get the best American Local Grown Fruits & Vegetables. Besides that there are delicious baked breads, dairy products and yes eggs and chickens.

I usually will never order chicken when I dine out mostly because what I learned in school, as chickens are a friendly vector for a wide range of disease transmission.

So the question is, am I safer eating a free range chicken or one which has been segregated from the other chickens? My inclination would be not to rick eating eggs or chicken from free range chickens, as they all are free to run around eating each others excrement.

[dick1973]

nana and papa ate "free range" chickens and eggs all their life. the ones from their yard! They still had to feed the chickens but they ate bugs as well. They were very healthy. Nana lived a long life, on the other hand Papa died young at 75 years.

i think the free range chickens as well as grass fed beef should be cheaper, but they are not. i don't know why.

[TexasHorseLady]

Free range chickens, in my experience, tend to be healthier because they are not confined, and they certainly taste better from all the different things they eat (from seeds to bugs to mice) than their confined counterparts.

My grandparents and my parents and my great-grandparents ate free range chicken all their lives (my daddy's mother raised them and sold eggs, as well). Mama, the youngest of nine, died at 80 fro complications of a broken hip she got running for the phone from the shower because she thought ti was her boyfriend calling. She died at the youngest age of any of her siblings except the one that died in the 1918 flu epidemic.

Eggs from free range chickens are likely healthier than those from confined chickens, for similar reasons, but also because if you get them directly from the chicken, they still have the protective coating that is washed off when the eggs are packaged up pretty for the grocery store as if they've never seen a chicken before. That natural coating keeps the bacteria out in case the egg is going to turn into a baby chicken some day, and as soon as you wash it off, you've left the egg vulnerable.

[arsbadmojo]

Chickens are total omnivores, and free range birds will eat frogs, snakes, bugs, worms, and all manner of vegetation. Makes for very tasty chicken!

[1984vt]

Couped chickens actually create a bacteria that is very harmful for humans to inhale and that is why chicken workers actually wear those little masks. I don't know of any cases where this bacteria has transmitted outside the coupe but, you never know.

Free Range are pretty much yard birds unless some people have then in a confined fence then, they are subject to the same bacteria that couped chickens create.

[tasmtairy]

My Dad always said to eat top row chickens! So when we would have chicken that wasn't very good, he would say it must have been bottom row chicken The top row gets the feed and the rest get....well you know, everything else

[Nedely]

I've never seen a chicken eating another chickens excrement. And I raised chickens as a kid.

Even "free range" chickens are fed by farmers. They're fed corn or grain exclusively. Not as bad as "mass produced" chickens, but not totally the way nature intended. Do yourself a favor, buy grass fed chicken. Totally grass fed chicken. Eggs from grass fed chickens are best, but may be difficult to find.

Oh yeah, I never eat chicken in a restaurant anymore.

[TexasHorseLady]

Pastured poultry is pretty good (though I've had some questions about Joel Salatin's pasture pens and raccoons, having seen what a determined raccoon can get through), but free range doesn't necessarily mean that the chickens are fed anything they wouldn't eat naturally if they could get to it (which is, when you get right down to it, pretty much anything they can catch that won't fight back too hard). Not at least in my experience raising them. And pastured poultry isn't really free range because where they can range is pretty strictly controlled.

[Huckleberry3911948]

born free as free as the wind
give me fast food

sing it.

[sarahkate_m]

Oh Huck, it hasn't been long enough since I repped you...

Chicken... I'm a picky shopper. I want veggie fed animals. I spend alot for meat & eggs (although WMart has the BEST deal on any egg under the sun).

My chickens lately have been looking very BANGED up & BRUiSED. Gross. I don't want abused chickens... But I have to eat. And it's like I'm MAKING food & I'm not going to stop in my tracks & return the chicken just to find every other chicken is also going to be bruised & yucky.

So I just pick out the bruises after the meat cooks. The bruises are red & bloody.

I don't think about free range or not although it sounds prosaic. I think the ones I get are probably free RANGE when they're thrown into the truck... like a MISSILE. Poor li'l chickens.

Kate