• There are many poultry foods.chicken image by Pity from Fotolia.com
  
  There are many forms of edible poultry. Chickens, ducks, geese, quail, squab, turkey, emu, and ostrich are eaten in different places around the globe. The diet that the bird consumes changes the taste and nutritional content of the meat. There are many foods available for domesticated fowl to eat, each of which has its advantages and disadvantages.
  
  

Grass Fed

• Grass fed poultry feed on a diet that consists of mostly grass. Most domesticated birds cannot survive entirely on grass, so it is important to supplement this diet with other food, such as insects, grains, or legumes. Usually the poultry does not try to eat the grass, but inadvertently consumes the grass while picking for some other food source, such as seeds.
  
  

Free Range

• Free range poultry have the ability to travel wherever they want to find food. Usually this means that the fowl has a greater variety in their diet, especially if they are a wild bird. Free range chickens may have a more limited diet because the owner of the chickens must still provide the chickens with feed of some sort. Free range does not necessarily mean that the birds find all of their own food, just that they are allowed to travel short distances to get it.
  
  

Grain Fed

• Grain fed poultry has a diet high in grains and legumes. This is the diet of choice for most farmers who raise domesticated birds. Many farm birds, such as geese, ducks and chickens live off of a grain-heavy diet through the use of chicken feeds. Grain is important for birds, but it can produce an imbalance of omega-6 fatty acids, which can lead to degenerative diseases in humans that consume too many of the unhealthy fats. An addition of flax seeds to a grain mixture will help keep the omega-6 concentration in poultry low.
  
  

Pastured

• Pastured poultry have a varied diet because they have access to anything living that grows inside the pasture. Larger birds, such as emus and ostriches, as well as gaming birds, have a pastured diet. These birds must pick through grass to find edible foods. They eat a varied diet of insects, snails, grass, seeds, and grains. A few farm birds also have pastured diets, but some farmers use chicken cages to move the chickens around the pasture which is somewhat limiting to the diet.