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Not to burst anyone's balloon here about "free range" or "Cage Free" chickens, but unless you have visited the farm and or personally know the chicken farmers. You might just as well be eating chickens raised in confinement.
In the US, in order to be labelled "free range" the chickens only need to have access to the outdoors. Forget all your bucolic fantasies about the outdoors on an MGM backlot "farm"
You could have a chicken house the size of an airplane hangar packed with chickens, living and dead (they die quite readily) poor ventilation, no lights, and at the far end of the 200 yard vault you have a two foot opening to a concrete slab.
That set up is common and will allow you to label your chicken "cage free" and "free range"
You cannot rely on the US government to protect your interests. Since the USDA got involved in defining terms like "Organic" the terms have become meaningless. Actually, marketing has always been based on bullshit, but now it seems stronger than ever.
Really, you cannot believe anything that is written on packaging, especially if the company doing the writing have more money than the government agencies that are allegedly regulating them.
In other words if you didn't personally see that chicken running around before you ate it then it came from a confinement operation.
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And now I'm finished posting.
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