Cage free eggs are all the rage these days. Well, they're certainly throwing me into a fit of rage, anyway. What's wrong with cage free? Take a look at the picture at the top of the article for all you need to know. The birds are still in a cage, it's just the size of a barn now, and they've got to share it with a zillion other birds. The only bright side to this is that it's increasing the cost of raising chickens (setting up a new cage-free barn from scratch now costs $30 per bird versus $8 for the old model), but with demand far outstripping supply those costs are going to be sent back to consumers.

Ah, consumers. Lovely people. They just want to feel good about an industry where every male chick at the hatchery is killed shortly after birth because males don't lay eggs. They want to feel that somehow farmers are going to have a better chance of taking care of thousands of birds roaming around a packed barn floor than if the birds were stuffed into cages. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of the old system either, but consumers need to wake up and do the math: there are 279 million laying hens in the United States. "Humane farming" (whatever that is) simply doesn't scale.