There you are again: standing slack-jawed and confused in the chicken section of the grocery store, squinting under fluorescent lights and shivering from the cold. How is it possible that there could be so many different kinds of chicken, each characterized by different incomprehensible words. Organic. Cage-free. Air-chilled. What does it all mean??
At this point, we know that the best chickens are the ones that have the freedom to run around fields, eating worms and bugs and all that good stuff. They taste better, have more developed muscles, and a generally higher quality of life. If you can buy a top-notch whole chicken from your farmers market, specialty butcher, or trusted grocer, that's amazing. But they can get expensive, and sometimes you just want a damn chicken for dinner without all the work of hunting down the perfect bird.
And that's why knowing what the words on the chicken packaging mean—and which ones don't mean anything—is important. It's the difference between a tasty whole roast chicken and a ho-hum one. Here's what everything on that grocery store poultry package means:
Organic
That familiar USDA Organic logo means that the chicken you're looking at was fed organic feed and at least had access to the outdoors. That's cool! As a general rule, we like to keep chemicals out of our food as much as possible, so we seek out organic chicken whenever possible. That's the way nature wanted you to enjoy chicken. Probably.
Antibiotic-Free and Hormone-Free
Hormone-free chicken doesn't really mean anything—the USDA actually prohibits the use of added hormones in poultry, so it's all supposed to be hormone-free. Antibiotics, on the other hand, are allowed, so that antibiotic-free designation means that you're not going to end up eating any weird chicken medication when you eat that chicken. If you see the USDA Organic label on an antibiotic free bird, you know it's an honest claim. Which is a good thing, we think. You're not a chicken! No chicken medication for you!
Cage-Free
What do you think about when you hear the words cage-free? Chickens with great health insurance and paid maternity leave, running through sunny, sprawling fields? Probably. But guess what: Cage-free doesn’t actually mean anything. Most meat chickens (unlike egg chickens) don’t really live in cages, even in big factory farming operations where they're all cooped up in some scary windowless warehouse. That's still "cage-free"! This is a throw-away term.
Free-Range
Freedom ain't free. Or guaranteed, if you're a chicken. Free-range doesn’t necessarily mean that your chicken was raised in a pasture (only that it had access to one). So this term could mean very good things for chicken...or kind of not that much at all. Again, it comes down to your trust in the person selling you the chicken.
