In some unsurprising news for anyone who’s seen Food Inc., a major egg supplier for McDonald’s has been exposed for the cruel, inhumane, and unsanitary conditions of its egg farms. ABC is covering the story tonight, using the hidden-camera footage seen below in a video made by Mercy for Animals, and in response McDonald’s has already canceled their contract with the supplier in question, Sparboe Egg Farms, the fifth largest egg supplier in the country.
Folks like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser have suggested before that McDonald’s — given its role as one of the country’s largest buyers of meat, potatoes, and eggs — has the power to reform industrial farming. And McDonald’s says that they expect “all of [their] suppliers to meet [their] stringent requirements for delivering high quality food prepared in a humane and responsible manner.” But this is obviously just the tip of the iceberg — one can assume that if the fifth largest egg producer likes to leave dead hens to rot in their cages alongside laying hens, and burn off the beaks of chicks so they don’t peck at other birds, the other four big egg producers probably do something similar, no?
Below, the undercover footage shot in Sparboe’s facilities in Iowa, Minnesota, and Colorado, which were supplying all the eggs to McDonald’s locations west of the Mississippi.
McDonald’s Dumps McMuffin Egg Factory Over Health Concerns [ABC]
McDonald’s Animal Cruelty: McDonald’s Drops Supplier Sparboe Egg Farms After Undercover Investigation [HuffPo]
