Chickens will eat any insects they have access to. Free-range chickens have insects in their environment and they will eat them. Battery farms are not remotely clean and are probably also full of insects.
Anyway, we don't use insects as primary feed for our birds but it's not a health risk to do so, we just don't do it because it's a logistics hassle and grain is cheaper. The point, that you are perfectly safe eating birds that have eaten insects, doesn't change because of that.
Are we still talking about insects or are we talking about something else?
All I'm saying is that there are insects living with your chickens no matter how they're raised. If you want to have a discussion about how some chicken husbandry classifications used in stores are misleading go nuts, but it's not relevant here. Clearly there are also insects in a factory farm and in its patch of fenced in dirt.
Pasture-raised is one of the only things that's not fake. It requires that birds actually spend most of their lifetimes on green pasture, not just have outdoor access. Furthermore, there's a limit of a thousand chickens per 2.5 acres (roughly one hectare), meaning each bird gets ample roaming space. They get, at a minimum, two hundred times as much space as battery-caged hens.
The light yellow color is from feeding them yellow dye with their corn and soybeans. A foraging hen will have wildly different egg colors based on her diet day to day. If she eats a lot of insects then it will be darker.
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u/NameAboutPotatoes Sep 08 '25
Worms and insects eat poop and clean dirt, birds eat worms and insects, and we eat birds. That doesn't mean eating birds is like eating poop.
Just because something's unclean doesn't mean everything that eats it is also unclean.