An article in the San Jose Mercury News caught my eye in a cafeteria the other day:

Google employs roughly 6,000 workers, consumes about 300,000 eggs a year and uses 7,000 pounds of liquid egg products in its baking and cooking. By year end, the company will have 12 cafes on its Mountain View campus.

Gee, that’s fifty eggs per worker per year, or roughly one egg per worker per week. Strange statistic, no, especially since Google eggs are free?

Anyway, when I read a bit further, I came to the somewhat predictable reason that egg consumption and Internet companies are in the same story:

Google officials plan to announce their employee cafeterias will no longer serve eggs that come from hens crammed into small cages.

I have to be honest. My first reaction when reading a sentence like this is to think of happy little feathered hens, clucking around in freedom instead of cooped-up in cubical-like cages. Sunny warm afternoons, green fields, blue skies…it’s all so ideal. But then my senses come back to me and I wonder if the hens are healthier and the eggs are safer without the control of a cage. For what it’s worth, on a micro level my friend forgot to put his hens back in the cage recently. He found one hiding in the compost bin a week later. A foot was all that was left of the other one — racoons, he thinks. So the cage or coop is certainly useful on a local level, what about the big guys?

At least 95 percent of the 300 million laying hens in the United States live in wire cages known as “battery cages,” because they are stacked in batteries, or arrays.

Not to be confused with the Google offices, which have employees stacked in batteries, or arrays, of cubicals. They apparently choose to work in those confined spaces. In fact, things were so tight during the boom years that inflatable tents inside the buildings were sometimes used for meetings. Some say the free food keeps them happy in these confined spaces, but I digress.

The cages allow farmers to reduce disease, and death rates are lower for birds living in cages than for birds that roam outside or on henhouse floors, Gregory [senior vice president for United Egg Producers in Atlanta, the leading trade association for egg farmers] said.

“We don’t believe it is cruel,” he said. “I grew up on a farm when everything was free roaming. But the cages provide so many more benefits for the health and welfare of the birds.”

In a 2003 study of egg farms in the United Kingdom, hens in cages had a 5 percent mortality rate compared with 8 percent for both barn-raised and free-range chickens.

Strange that the study is from the UK while all the other numbers are from the US market. Nonetheless, the cages obviously reduce costs since they introduce a number of controls and efficiencies. The question, therefore, is whether a definition of “cruelty” or “welfare” has been agreed upon between the industry and animal rights activists, and whether this has been honored. And perhaps more importantly is the efficiency and safety of the animals even worth it if the consumers are willing to pay more money for eggs of chickens that survive a free range? I mean, what cost does that extra 3 percent mortality rate really add to each egg, and what about the difference in taste or desireability? The entire article doesn’t mention anything about the actual quality of one egg versus the other, or the impact of free range chickens on the range (the ecosystem and environmental changes).

FIVE LITTLE CHICKENS

Five little chickens by the old barn door,
One saw a beetle, and then there were four.
Four little chickens under a tree;
One saw a cricket, and then there were three.
Three little chickens looked for something new:
One saw a grasshopper; then there were two.
Two little chickens said, “Oh, what fun!”
One saw a ladybug; then there was one.
One little chicken began to run,
For he saw a katydid, then there were none!