Is Organic Poultry Really Better?

            Meat products are the sum total of all the lives of the animals they are ultimately made of. When you eat meat, you eat everything the animal ate beforehand and you, in some respects, are experiencing the lives they led, albeit in a filtered fashion. How the lives of those animals developed will then necessarily have an impact on the final product, the meat.

            You might divide the inputs to produce that end product of animal husbandry into three: the medicine or medical products used to treat their illnesses or assist in their general health, the place or location in which they are raised, and the food they are given to grow and thrive. All three in some way or another are considered when deciding whether they can be sold under an organic label.

            Different legislative bodies have different rules on what makes a product organic, but they all tend to be similar at the end of the day. In the EU for an agricultural product to bear the organic label, no genetically modified organisms can be used, no ionizing radiation used, and herbicides, pesticides and artificial fertilizer use is limited. GMOs are those whose DNA has been altered through genetic engineering. Ionizing radiation is used to get rid of microorganisms or insects on crops. Herbicides kill weeds, pesticides kill pests, and artificial fertilizer enriches the soil artificially. They all add foreign chemicals to the soil, the plant, and ultimately the animals.

            In livestock, to be sold with an organic label the animals must be given 100% organic feed, the feed should be obtained primarily from the same farm as the animals are raised on or locally, no animals may be cloned, no growth promoters and synthetic amino-acids may be used, natural reproduction must be used, and non-organically raised animals cannot be mixed with organically raised ones. There is also a whole set of rules specifically on animal welfare, which includes limiting the number of livestock to minimize overgrazing, erosion, and pollution and having skilled and knowledgeable hands working with the animals.  

            So when someone says that organic is “better,” they’re really pointing to a bunch of aspects that eventually make it better, just one of which is the for-your-health side. They’re also better for the environment (trying to minimize pollution and erosion), for local economies (by encouraging closer-to-home supply sources and by supporting through purchase other organic producers downstream), and for animals (by emphasizing and studying their well-being and the care taken in raising them). The benefits of eating organic food, meat or veggies, for people (by reducing chemicals applied to their feed and hormones applied medically that then can get transferred through their meat to us) is also obvious.

            Food Crowd believes in organic agriculture and animal husbandry and that’s why we offer a wide range of products grown following those principles. Food Crowd offers organic poultry that is ESMA certified (UAE authorized) from Al Dahra Farm. Check out our organic food store to see what we have to take care of our planet, be respectful to the animals that go into our meat, and take care of yourself and your loved ones.