What, exactly, is a "free range" chicken?

Sure, you've been to Whole Foods and seen those "free range chickens" and if you're like me, you've wondered: what, exactly, is a free range chicken?

In his book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan goes to Petaluma Poultry to see for himself what makes a free range chicken.

A  FAQ on the Petaluma Poultry website describes "free range" this way:
 

What does free range mean? What is the difference between free range chickens and conventional chickens?
Free range means that chickens have an outdoor pen in which to roam and forage freely in addition to an enclosed poultry house.
The pens are normally the same size as the house. The difference between free range and conventional chickens is that free range chickens are allowed to go outdoors to roam and forage freely. By having the extra space outdoors to be able to move about freely, it reduces stress, allowing chickens to better develop their leg muscles, and perhaps get flavor enhancement by eating fermented grains and seeds that are in the grasses and soil in the outdoor pen.
Conventional chickens are not allowed to go outdoors. They are raised in the confinement of their poultry house and not allowed outdoor access.

If you read the FAQ carefully, you'll notice that Petaluma never really says that the chickens actually go outside.  There's a reason for that.

In his visit to Petaluma Poultry, Pollan described visiting a Petaluma "free range" facility:

"The chicken houses don't resemble a farm so much as a military barracks: a dozen long, low-slung sheds with giant fans at either end.  I donned what looked like a hooded white hazmat suit -- since the birds receive no antibiotics yet live in close confinement, the company is ever worried about infection, which could doom a whole house overnight -- and stepped inside.  Twenty thousand birds moved away from me as one, like a ground-hugging white cloud, clucking softly.  The air was warm and humid and smelled powerfully of ammonia: the fumes caught in my throat.  Twenty thousand is a lot of chickens, and they formed a gently undulating white carpet that stretched nearly the length of a football field.  After they adjusted to our presence, the birds resumed sipping from waterers suspended from the ceiling, nibbled organic food from elevated trays connected by tubes to a silo outside, and did pretty much everything chickens do except step outside the little doors located at either end of the shed.
Compared to conventional chickens, I was told, these organic birds have it pretty good: They get a few more square inches of living space per bird (though it was hard to see how they could be packed together much more tightly), and because there were no hormones or antibiotics in their feed to accelerate growth, they get to live a few days longer.  Though under the circumstances it's not clear that a longer life is necessarily a boon.
Running along the entire length of each shed was a grassy yard maybe fifteen feet wide, not nearly big enough to accommodate all twenty thousand birds inside should the group ever decide to take the air en masse.  Which, truth be told, is the last thing the farm managers want to see happen, since these defenseless, crowded, and genetically identical birds are exquisitely vulnerable to infection. This is one of the larger ironies of growing organic food in an industrial system: It is even more precarious than a conventional industrial system.  But the federal rules say an organic chicken should have "access to the outdoors," and Supermarket Pastoral imagines it, so Petaluma Poultry provides the doors and the yard and everyone keeps their fingers crossed.
It would appear Petaluma's farm managers have nothing to worry about.  Since the food and water and flock remain inside the shed, and since the little doors remain shut until the birds are at least five weeks old and well into their habits, the chickens apparently see no reason to venture out into what must seem to them an unfamiliar and terrifying world.  Since the birds are slaughtered at seven weeks, free range turns out to be not so much a lifestyle for these chickens as a two-week vacation option."

So there you have it.  "Free range" at Petaluma Poultry ends up meaning that after five weeks, doors are opened at either end of a chicken shed.  The food, water and flock remain inside.  Two weeks later, the birds are slaughtered. 

So much for having the birds "go outdoors to roam and forage freely."