Vegetarians: How can you determine whether your eggs are free ranged?!

Best Answer - Chosen by Voters

To be honest with you, I only buy eggs local where I can actually look and see if they *really* are free-ranged. A lot of them still keep them kept crowded, and provide bad living habitats.

There are eggs however that do say 'caged-free,' you could research the industry that makes them. They should be in the regular egg section

I'm not sure about the milk...but have you tried soy or almond? They taste just as good, perhaps even better!

The price does differ, yes. It tends to be more expensive.

If you buy your eggs from a supermarket they are probably not free range.
You need to buy them from a farm where you can see the hens are genuinley free range and happy.
Some health food shops can vouch for their eggs but you still need to be careful.
You can't tell with milk as they are all mixed together, so go for soya or rice milks.
Free range are usually more expensive but it really is worth it, especially for the animals.

As others have said, the labeling standards for free range eggs are so vague that they are essentially meaningless. In the grocery store, you might see "cage-free" eggs, which means that the hens aren't kept in battery cages, at least, but they're probably kept in a huge indoor warehouse instead, with minimal access to the outdoors.

Local small farmers are your best bet for real free range eggs. You can find directories of producers on the following sites:

http://www.localharvest.org/
http://apppa.org/
http://www.eatwild.com/

For free range milk, look for the label "grass-fed." Unfortunately, it tends to be pretty expensive, so you can compromise with regular organic milk. Some of the organic dairies offer better access to pasture than others. Of the large, nationwide producers, Organic Valley is supposed to be pretty good and Horizon is supposed to be terrible.

You can check your local brands here:

http://cornucopia.org/dairysurvey/index.…

most of the time free range is just a label. the rules for free range chicken are incredibly vague, and dont really mean much. the best thing to do would be to buy localy where you can actually walk around the farm and see the conditions, or if thats not an option, really investigate before you buy- go to the companys website, and call them for information to make sure you get the truth.

i find it very hard to find good milk, so i just switched to milk alternatives such as soy and almond milk- both are great!

yes, you do have to pay more for free range and local eggs, but it is so worth it (:

free range chickens will have darker egg yolks. my free range hens lay eggs with dark orange yolks compared to the yellow ones at the supermarket. free range necessarily mean the eggs are great. often the chickens are crammed in a building and that would be called free range. pasture ranged eggs are the best and you can be pretty sure you are eating good healthy eggs. factory farmed eggs or basically anything tend to be cheaper. a browned shelled egg has a slightly better chance of being a better egg. brown eggs are not healthier brown eggs are laid by larger breeds of chickens that tend to be kept buy smaller family farms. this definitely does not mean any brown egg is better because factory farms do keep brown egg layers but they tend to sell more white eggs. free ranged milk does't really mean anything like with eggs. pasture raised milk is much better and taste better too.

"Free Range" is sometimes a gimick. Sometimes the chickens are all indoors 100,000+ to a barn, and there is a small door to it that goes outdoors to a small fenced in area not even big enough for all the chickens at once to go to. The problem is there is no legal definition of what a free range chicken actually is. Your best bet is to research the company that makes the eggs

Ilive in a small country town where I can source them from locals that have chickens, you do need to read the labels on the cartons very cardfully as I have made a mistake in the past. Neverseen free range milk, milk is generally sourced from grass eating cows, here in Australia anyway, do a little research. Rice milk I can't take to, and soy, the more I read about it the less I want to know