You may have seen the headlines.  "Free-Range Eggs May Be Less Healthy Than Regular Eggs."  Oh, the news loves a good "man bites dog" story.  Much less one which seems to puncture what so many see as the smug hypocrisy of the organic food movement.  

My first quibble with this title is the use of the phrase "regular eggs."  I think we should just be honest about it and call them "battery cage eggs."  After all, that is what "regular eggs" really are.  You should see people's faces fall when I point out that all eggs are from hens living in battery cages, unless otherwise specified.   A lot of people don't realize the truth about eggs.  Pretty terrible, right?  

(In case you were wondering, I don't buy eggs - I have pet chickens.  When I do buy eggs, I'm lucky enough to be able to buy them from a local chicken farm which has been Certified Humane.  But I digress.)

Back on track, if you read the article further it specifies that this research was done in Taiwan, which even the article admits is "is a heavily populated, industrialized island with many of the municipal incinerators that release PCDDs and PCDFs."  Well that's your problem right there.  

In fact, Taiwan is one of the world's most polluted countries.  According to the EPA (a Chinese governmental entity which confusingly shares an acronym with the American governmental entity of the same charter), there are "4 registered factories and 425 motor vehicles for every square kilometer in the Taiwan area."  

Taiwan is facing an environmental crisis the likes of which we, in the West, can barely comprehend.  If I sometimes feel hopeless, as though all the environmentally conscious talk of the last 20 years has been useless, I can look at Taiwan and take hope.  

Taiwan is what America would look like now if our government had given industry free reign for the last 100 years, and if there had never been an ecological uprising that started in the 1960s and continues today.  If our "green revolution" seems to be going nowhere, consider the alternative: a world where it's safer to eat battery cage eggs than eggs from free range animals.  

Taiwan is an excellent example of a system that is just plain broken.  As an example, Taiwanese pig farmers do not collect their pigs' manure in any fashion.  They just let it run off, raw, into the nearest river or lake.  Hog farming is no pristine example of shining ecological tidiness in America, but at least the law (and the neighbors) require that pig feces be collected in a lagoon, to keep it separate from the ground water.

Leaving aside the fact that the scientist sampled a mere 18 eggs (six free range and 12 from farms and markets), this statistic says nothing about free range eggs.  If this is what happens to the flesh and eggs of grazing animals in Taiwan, then I sure hope the people there are importing most of their meat, milk, and eggs.  Let's face it, "Should I buy free range or conventional eggs?" is the least of their concerns.

Image credit: Flickr/yvon.liu