All dining halls may soon use cage-free eggs if the university accepts a proposal made by the Student Services Committee at Thursday's Senate meeting, said director of dining services Owen Moore.
Cage-free eggs are from chickens that are allowed to roam free during the day and are only confined to sheds at night. Hayden Dining Hall already has cage-free eggs, Moore said.
SEAL, or Students for Education and Animal Liberation, is one of the NYU clubs supporting the use of cage-free eggs.
"Right now, chickens are kept in battery cages about the size of a laptop computer," SEAL member Banu Quadir said. "There might be six chickens in one of these cages. There are warehouses full of these cages, stacked on each other, which produces a lot of greenhouse gases."
But the cage-free eggs at Hayden are 38 percent more expensive than conventional eggs and there is no difference in taste, Moore said.
Ninety-five percent of the almost 300 million laying hens in the U.S. are confined in these wire cages, unable to spread their wings or behave in their natural ways, resulting in lives of suffering, according to an article from the Humane Society of the United States.
Quadir said that NYU should purchase cage-free eggs because of its environmental goals.
"They're a good alternative for NYU because it's showing that we are for a more sustainable system, one of the university's initiatives," she said.
Moore said that NYU Dining will consider the addition of this product as they would any other.
"We will monitor the use, customer input, expenses, availability, and then do a thorough evaluation and calculate the impact prior to rolling it out campus-wide," he wrote in an e-mail.
Over 150 other U.S. universities and many companies have chosen to use only cage-free eggs. This includes George Washington University, the University of Connecticut, Vassar College, Whole Foods Market, Ben & Jerry's and Burger King. Even entire countries, such as Germany and Austria, have banned the use of battery cages. The European Union will phase out their use entirely by 2012, according to the Humane Society article.
CAS sophomore Kevin Hall supports the change.
"I think it would be a good thing," he said, "because minimizing suffering is a positive goal."
Not every student at NYU is as concerned. Stern freshman Stephen Li said it "doesn't really matter" to him.
"Eggs are eggs," he said.
Emma Davis is a staff writer. E-mail her at news@nyunews.com.
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