Doesn't it seem as though some nonprofit organization could come up with a stringent term for The Sort Of Food You'd Actually Want To Eat, then trademark that term and rigorously apply it only to The Sort Of Food You'd Actually Want To Eat? Some place like Consumer's Union, say?

I have to skip reading these posts when you do them, Ezra, because I like the taste of cholesterol.

Mmmm...ionophores. My favorite!

Lab-grown meat is our best hope for ending cruelty to animals. Most people aren't going to stop eating meat any time soon. We need to feed them meat that doesn't come from animals.

soon, there will be a mandatory label on our food, just as on the doors of our buildings...
"eating this food is a risk to your health."

"All-natural" on a label basically means "all-marketing".

jacqueline, most of us are already well-aware that a diet of building doors isn't good for you.

Natural means nothing. Everything that happens to any food ultimately comes from nature. It's time to drop the term.

"No Antibiotics or Hormones" is better marketing anyway, since not only is it specific, but it implies that the other chickens in the supermarket *do* have antibiotics and hormones.

Chickens have been bread for thousands of years to be domesticated. This idea of a bird wandering out in the wild under the sun has never been true, at least with anything resembling a modern chicken.

Focus on what actually matters to our diet, not on "natural" mythology.

Jeremy S: So you don't see any difference between an animal that gets to walk around a barnyard, get some fresh air and sun, and do some foraging, and an animal that is kept inside in a cage and full of drugs until it is killed?

I understand your point about the term "natural," but let's not be too broad. There are big differences among "wild," "natural," and "cruel."

Is that chicken smoking an American Spirit?

You're right, of course. What I wondered, though, was how many large producers can qualify for the new label if you can't use antibiotics. Again, I agree with your point that it's misleading, but in the end I'm curious to know if the use of antibiotics ends up being a surrogate for all sorts of bad practices. If you can't use them, can you practice "conventional" livestock production at all? Will the label sort of work despite the USDA's attempts to water it down?

Beyond Green

This is one of your silliest articles. This information has never been hidden from anybody, and can be better understood by the slightest amount of devoted research. If consumers care to know where their food comes from, they can find out. Resources online, Agricultural journals, Extension offices... there are a myriad of options! Also, I have never known a farmer to close their gates to a polite and curious consumer. I've toured dozens of farms and slaughter houses, with no problem.
Chickens, by the way, are cannibalistic by nature. That's why producers take such measures to protect them from each other. The most disgusting farms I've seen were free range farms. The animals were brutal, and many left critically injured. The grass was blood stained, and the animals showing every sign of high stress. And yet we continue to pay more to have the chickens raised this way! Sometimes, the label simply doesn't say it all. That's why you educate yourself. Every label in every industry is like this.
Before you preach one lifestyle or another, (especially when so many are watching and listening) you should make extraordinary efforts to be armed with the right information.
...This entry was very disappointing. I expect better.

If I were told that an animal was "naturally raised" I'd suspect that the person I'm talking to doesn't actually know anything about raising livestock. I have a general sense of what people mean by it but it falls apart pretty quickly when you start getting down to specifics. Domestic livestock and poultry aren't particularly natural for starters, but arsenic and nightshade are.

So if you're the person who has to sit down and negotiate with other people, all of whom have particular interests of some sort or another, exactly what "natural" means you're going to have a bunch of problems. I would tend to expect that it would end up exactly where it did.

If anybody's culpable here I think it's the foodies, for promoting a vague, imprecise, feel-good term as a product differentiator. When I go to the grocery store and buy eggs or other animal products I tend to look for specific terms, like "grass-fed," "free-range," etc.

I understand the desire to eat "happy meat," but unless you can visit the farm and see how the animals die, you are a fool if you buy the marketing offered by people who make a profit selling you animal flesh.

Are you going to attack "beechwood aged" next?

"the natural life of a chicken"

You're probably thinking about the natural life of some medieval chicken, but modern times call for modern chickens.

In 21st century America we eat American chickens. They don't get out and play, they sit in their houses all day eating crap and getting fat.

FWIW, this definition of "natural" is exactly what I would expect - the phrases "cage-free" and "free-range" exist for a reason (even if the terms are used misleadingly - that's another story). But the point is that, when I see "naturally raised,"* I'm thinking, "Good, no chemicals," not "Good, this chicken was Free To Be Meat For You And Me."

Jenn G's post smells a little corporate to me, but I agree with her basic point - not a strong post, and at best a quibble.

Also, ostap @ 12:31 is great.

* Actually, "All Natural" is what I've seen - this seems like a new formulation

Corporate?? Come on! I'm an International Agriculture student in Manhattan, Kansas! Give me a break.
Thanks for getting my point, though.

ostap wins the thread.

And I now have an image of les poulets de Bresse drinking coffee and smoking Gitanes.

I value all the information given here about the best ways to raise livestock, but it seems to me the point of the post was about the culture of the USDA itself.

Read from their own release as cited in the post:

"The segment of the marketplace that includes specific animal raising claims has experienced exponential growth in the past five years. Use of a naturally raised marketing claim standard has the potential to increase the available supply of U.S. meat products eligible for niche marketing programs in the United States, the European Union, and other export markets that require livestock to be raised without the administration of growth promotants.

"USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) works with industry representatives, academia, and other interested parties to establish or revise U.S. standards for nearly 240 agricultural products. Industry uses standards in the marketplace to specify the quality of commodities. Standards facilitate commerce by providing a common language for trade and a means of measuring value in the marketing of agricultural products. Increasingly, livestock and meat producers are using production or processing claims to distinguish their products in the marketplace."

Ross has this right. I'm not sure what post Jenn is responding to, but this one doesn't make a normative claim on how chickens should be raised. The argument is that the USDA has decided to sanction a marketing term that's far more misleading that simply slapping "No growth hormones, antibiotics, or animal feed" on the package, and they have done it at the behest of the industry.

Far be it from me to defend the USDA but as a nerd who actually has written standards (internet and telecomm), when I think about trying to sit down and write a standard for "natural" what I come up with is pretty close to what the USDA came up with. The term "natural" is uselessly vague, I think, and potentially extremely misleading (again - chickens: unnatural; lead, arsenic, nightshade: natural). Standards require a high degree of precision.

I tend to think that what Ezra wants is probably somewhat closer to the Hekhsher Tzedek effort.

The trouble with the article (and what I was so disappointed with, Ezra) was the under-researched argument. You made it very clear that, aside from expressing personal preferences and limited knowledge of the subject, you can say little about Agricultural processing that holds true. Not everybody can specialize in every facet of day-to-day life, qualifying them to try to push one way or another, but they can do a little bit more unbiased research than what was done for this entry. I was, for the sake of a relatively young and ever changing industry, simply trying to point out the complexity of the process. Animosity towards the USDA over something as ill-developed as these ideas will do little more than toughen their resolve in being less consumer and opinion driven in the future.
Basically, I wanted you to think about the result of writing something you don't truly understand. Generations after ours could pay the price for blind, hot headed, and very public blogging warfare.. (and misinformed stunts like this could be a catalyst for such a division.)

But the natural life of domestic fowl is the life of a widget, no?

Jenn, I think Ezra's probably pretty well on top of one narrow slice of the food debates and represents their arguments faithfully as far as I can tell. But there's not the kind of breadth there that I think is necessary to do real analysis, and although I don't think there's any substantive harm done is does lead me to wonder if he's doing the same thing in other policy areas where I don't know enough myself to be able to tell if there's the same kind of narrow parochialism.

Although I think there's clearly a gap between the foodies and the aggies I'd rather see efforts to bridge the gap rather than to widen it. I've been kind of unhappy with Chris Clayton's stuff recently, where he's starting to get into some heavy-handed mockery of the foodies. At the same time the foodies need to understand that they're operating in a context in which they sound like a bunch of affluent, educated white urbanites who, well, you know. Trying to expand their privilege even more and run roughshod over the hillbillies while jacking up the price of food. It's kind of uncool. I think it's great that non-farmers are starting to pay very close attention to where their food comes from, and I'm hopeful that it will open up more options and markets for food producers who are trying to get out off the mega-farm treadmill. But I hope they can keep food wars into crossing over into class wars.

Jenn G:

In the first of your many posts, you state that, "This information has never been hidden from anybody, and can be better understood by the slightest amount of devoted research. If consumers care to know where their food comes from, they can find out." Yet then you reprimand Ezra for "...preach[ing] one lifestyle or another, (especially when so many are watching and listening)."

What about all the people "watching and listening" to the USDA? Sounds like you are holding Ezra, a writer, to a higher level of responsibility than an organization who is supposed to be working in the public interest as a trusted authority on our agricultural food supply. If we should not expect the USDA to give us a complete picture of what "naturally raised" means, certainly there is no harm in hearing a writer's opinion on the matter...especially since we are all so capable of doing our own "devoted research!"

As to your claim that free range farms are "disgusting," I'd be curious to know if you have ever watched a nature show. The sight of polar bears decapitating baby seals isn't pretty, nor are males of any species as they brutally fight for a mate...but both scenes are natural. In fact, I'd venture to say that, in the wild, there is quite a lot of blood in the grass. The whole point of free range farms is to allow animals to live as naturally possible -- including fights amongst one another that sometimes end in a grisly scene. I'm sorry if it doesn't match up with the idyllic pastoral painting you're used to, but it's certainly better than subjecting an animal to an unnatural, sedated life in a cage where it can't enjoy the sunshine (or fight with its neighbor when it's p*ssed!).

Jenn G, it sounds like you need to keep telling yourself all that. Over and over again in the mirror.

"Before you preach one lifestyle or another, (especially when so many are watching and listening) you should make extraordinary efforts to be armed with the right information."

Why are you so scared of reading a few more facts? A little more information? And what "lifestyle" are you referring to? I'm just curious.

Nothing about the meat & poultry you buy in a grocery store is natural. It is not natural to pump chickens so full of hormones they can't support their own necks, it's not natural to blow air into a pigs brain until he stops living & it's not natural to hang a cow upside down,slit it's throat & let it bleed to death. I am DISGUSTED to say that in America this is how we treat our animals.