Free range and the cost of chicken

I've always thought that the quality of life for a chicken is not much different than the quality of life for a wheat plant - somewhat better circumstances might yield a slightly better crop, but not so far superior that the average American will pay for it. Americans have this funny way of wanting EVERYTHING to have a high standard of living - even a chicken - and trying to vote, coerce, or bully the rest of us into paying for it. We want our chickens to live free on the range, enjoying more space, more reliable food, and a generally higher standard of living than most of the poor PEOPLE in the world. Seemed silly.

Not that I don't have feelings for chickens. My parents bought a cage full of chickens during an back-to-nature phase they went through in the 70's. I went with my folks to the farm, and I felt sad for our chickens' brethren in those stinky, crowded cages. The "farm" was an enormous metal building with rows of cages, packed tight with chickens, set over some sort of catch tray for the chicken manure. We brought home a cage full of chickens; I don't think my parents wanted to go through with the slaughter once the reality set in, but then the roosters sealed their fate - they cock-a-doodle-doo'ed at daybreak every morning. I helped slaughter our chickens and pluck them. I didn't much care for homegrown chicken - they were skinny, probably tasted fresher than my tastebuds understood, and they had pieces of feather stuck in their skin (yuck! I guess nobody taught mom and dad how to pluck a chicken). My older sister went off chicken altogether after having to eat our "pets" Henry and Martha. It took her about 20 years to recover. But I didn't much mind eating them - not that I had any say in the matter - I guess somewhere along the way I realized that Henry and Martha would have been Henry and Martha - and somebody's dinner - whether WE ate them or not. They weren't meant to be pets; they were meant to be dinner. And they did enjoy a civilized, much-loved lifestyle those last few months.

Nowadays, chicken is the new black - we're supposed to eat low-fat, healthy chicken any time we can't eat vegetarian. My husband used to buy the "premium" chicken, not free range but priced rather high. Now, mind you, I think of chicken as a step above tofu - not a superior cut of meat in its own right, but quite tasty in the right recipe. I just couldn't pay $6 a lb. for "special" chicken when chicken isn't very special. We switched to cheap chicken. One day, I got a pack of chicken breasts and one of them was bruised. Seems silly, but never having seen bruised chicken before, it got me wondering. Was it safe to eat? Why have I never seen a bruised piece of chicken before? How did the chicken get bruised?

Burgeoning research says that hormones and antibiotics in our food can have an impact on our health. Could it also be true that chickens raised in "factory farms" experience more stress - and release more stress hormones as a result? Could those stress hormones be unhealthy in humans? Could humans be absorbing some of those stress hormones? God forbid - could the "free ranger"s be right (though for all the wrong reasons)?