This week, the U.S. Poultry & Egg Association, the National Chicken Council, and the National Turkey Federation, will host a U.S. Poultry Industry Sustainability Workshop on May 24-25 in Atlanta. Invited attendees included key poultry integrators, retailers, food service companies and restaurants. They have shut the doors, however, to any groups advocating to create sustainable solutions with regard to workers, farmers and animal welfare. The current trend to keep stakeholders and consumers in the dark…

You might not have caught it, but at the end of Stephanie Strom’s article this past weekend in The New York Times, Perdue made a big reveal. Back in December 2014, Compassion in World Farming released a video showing chickens raised in tightly packed warehouses, laying on feces-ridden litter and with red, raw bellies. To make matters worse, Perdue had been calling their production system “natural” and “humanely raised.” The video went viral overnight after…

The World Expo, being held in Milan, Italy, from May 1-Oct. 1, 2015, and themed, “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life,” is bringing together 140 countries to unravel one of the world’s greatest challenges. Alongside the Expo, the U.S. brings its pavilion titled, “American Food 2.0: United to Feed the Planet.” Here the U.S. boasts of showcasing innovations that will shape our future and solve our world’s most pressing issue: how will we feed…

Last month, something unprecedented happened that rocked the chicken industry’s world. Perdue contract farmer Craig Watts decided he’d had enough. Together with my organization, Compassion in World Farming, he released a video that gave the public a unique view into the secretive world of the chicken industry. He revealed what the National Chicken Council (NCC), USDA, and Perdue mean by “humanely raised” and “cage-free”: 30,000 chickens stuffed into a windowless warehouse, on feces-ridden litter, made…

Earlier this year, Cassandra White of Clarkston, GA, gathered more than 165,000 signatures for a Change.org petition asking Kroger to stop misleading customers. Kroger’s Simple Truth Natural Chicken bore the words “raised in a humane environment.” White said, “When I go to the grocery store, I read the labels carefully because I want to know that what I am buying to feed my family is something I can trust.” She found out that although the…

“Eat like your ancestors.” The phrase brings about feelings of nostalgia for all that is good, simple and natural about food. Perdue’s Harvestland campaign slogan conjures up an image of farming ways of the past. Its website points consumers to chicken recipes from the turn of the century. At that time, the world of chicken was a starkly different one from today. The habits of eating meat were also radically different. At the turn of…

Peering through a sunlit barn in rural Kansas, fourth-generation poultry farmer Frank Reese rattles off names of chicken breeds that were once common – Barred Rock, Dark Brahma, Ancona, Rhode Island Red, Dark Cornish. He points to an elegant-looking bird perching on some nest boxes. The bird, a Rose Comb Leghorn, flies down and runs under a wooden pallet to get some privacy. “There are only 50 left of that one,” Reese laments. We don’t think…