Food labeling 101: GMO, organic, and other common grocery labels decoded

A quick, easy guide to nine commonly seen (and misunderstood) food labels, from 'GMO' to 'grass-fed.'

7. Free-range

Ross William Hamilton/The Oregonian/AP/File
Eggs at Willamette Egg Farms in Canby, Ore.

Definition: You’ll see this label on eggs and poultry. In conventional operations, chickens typically are raised indoors – either in grow-out houses (for broilers – chickens raised for meat) or battery cages (for egg-laying hens, although this practice is changing). The USDA requires that free-range chickens spend at least part of their time outdoors, but there is no unifying standard for the label beyond that. The terms can be confusing. Cage-free birds don't live in a cage, but they might not have access to the outdoors. Another common label for eggs is “barn roaming,” which applies to egg-laying chickens that are confined to a barn but not a small cage. Free-range has nothing to do with a chicken’s diet, so it might be fed conventionally grown feed and low levels of antibiotics, unless it's also certified organic.

The term also doesn’t regulate the size of those noncage spaces. Chickens can still be crowded into barns, and the outdoor space required for free range eggs doesn’t necessarily have to be large.

What it means for you: Eggs aren’t cost prohibitive to begin with, and many retailers already prohibit selling battery eggs. But a free-range label doesn’t necessarily equate to chickens roaming around freely (where, after all, they might be subject to predators).  

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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