| Chapter 1: | An Introduction to Polarity, Ambiguity, and Kinship |
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life as killable. It is tempting to use the example of the life of a battery hen against that of a free-range bird to get an idea of the difference: Each will die within the industrial coordinates of meat or egg production, but only the former will live a bare life and be treated accordingly—as killable. But, the example itself brings its own complications. In Australia, real questions have begun to emerge about what ‘free-range’ really means and if consumers can be assured that the eggs or meat they are purchasing really comes to them after the bird has lived well. The consumer affairs reporter for a major Australian metropolitan daily newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald, Kelly Burke, reported in 2009 that the supermarket giant retailer Woolworths had recorded a significant increase in consumer demand for both free-range eggs and free-range chicken meat. In good faith, consumers assume they are purchasing the meat and egg products of birds which have had access to open spaces and the opportunity to graze and predate on insects. However, Burke broke the story in the Sydney Morning Herald about the discrepancy between the amount of free-range eggs that were produced in Australia and the amount that supermarket retailers were selling—many more were being sold than it was possible for the small amount of accredited free-range producers to place into the market. This led Burke to detail in the Herald the differences between the categories of free-range, which are not generally known to consumers, who are presented with carton images of freely grazing, unrestrained birds. The ‘cage’ classification pertains to shed-housed birds with a minimum of 550 square centimetres per bird, and ‘barn’ describes birds who are also wholly contained indoors, with 14 birds per square meter (1,500 per hectare). ‘Free-range’ has two classifications within it. In the first, the only difference from the ‘barn’ category is that the birds have access to an outdoor area (which may not always be available to them). In the second—which is endorsed by the Free Range Egg and Poultry Association of Australia (FREPAA), a group that producers can join voluntarily in order to receive its endorsement when its conditions are met—only 750 birds are permitted per hectare, birds have unrestricted access to the outdoors during daylight hours, and beak trimming, which is present in all other classifications, is prohibited, because