The week we talked chicken: Hugh’s Chicken Run and Jamie’s Fowl Dinners

If ever there was a group that deserved the moniker ‘the forgotten millions’ it is the vast number of chickens living in squalid conditions to feed the UK’s unquenchable demand for cheap chickens and eggs. Until last week that is, when the forgotten millions were suddenly in the limelight, stars of their own week of TV programmes aired on mainstream terrestrial television.

As an occasional chicken-eater who always buys organic for its higher welfare standards I wasn’t expecting to particularly shocked by these programmes. Naive probably, as the level of access afforded to these programmes was pretty much unprecedented. There were two scenes that left me stunned:

– Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall performing a routine cull of birds in the intensive rearing facility used for the programme. Any bird failing to gain weight or with any hint of leg injury was immediately extracted from the barn and killed on site on a daily basis. The shock was partly in the sheer number of birds that just don’t make it through the system at all, and partly the realisation that throughout their short life-span (around 35 days) chickens are managed effectively as a crop rather than livestock, always weeded out rather than treated.

– Jamie Oliver gassing a group of new-born chicks to death. It should have been obvious really; only female chickens can lay eggs so something must happen to all of the males. All male chicks from egg-laying poultry breeds are humanely killed soon after birth (not being from one of the superfast growing meat breeds they are not economically viable to raise for meat). This was the hardest thing to learn; the practice is standard across the industry from battery to organic and as far as I can see the only way to remove yourself from it completely is by becoming vegan.

Shocking stuff. But then something pretty amazing has come out of this: everybody has been talking about the chickens. In the supermarket, at the bus stop, out with their friends, on Facebook – all over the place. People have started to talk to each other about where their food comes from, to think about the real costs behind our supermarket price wars (for animals and farmers) and to question the place of chicken as a everyday food. Undoubtedly it says something about this day and age that it has taken our celebrity chefs to achieve this but the important thing surely is the end result.

My food heroes awards have already been handed out for 2008 – to Hugh FW and Jamie Oliver. Anybody else will have to do something pretty spectacular to cap this. Praise is also due to Channel Four for being balanced on what is a very emotive issue and giving all parties the chance to have their say. The supermarkets, with the exception of Sainsburys, Waitrose and the Co-op, for the most part declined. Both programmes were careful to be fair to the farming community who are very much between a rock and hard place. 3 pence profit per chicken doesn’t leave you much room to manoeuvre when it comes to raising welfare standards.

Mildly surprising I thought has been the reaction of much of the national press who I guess were aiming for the devil’s advocate angle but in reality have been churning out some fairly poorly thought out articles about how we need cheap chicken to feed the world (most of them met by a huge barage of comments pointing out the crassness of their arguments). Price and fact checking has for the most part been completely absent from British journalism over the last week with many articles massively overestimating the price gap between normal, free range and organic in order to make a point, poorly. I’m loathe to single out an individual newspaper – you can find links to many of them as well as responses on the Chicken Out site. In the words of Janet Street-Porter, a lady who is never short for words:

“If we made fresh vegetables, pulses and pasta everyday food and treated meat as something special, then everyone could afford free-range.”

The bad thing about last week was that some of it made me feel like I was thirteen again, raging against the injustice of it all like you do as a teenager, but feeling woefully unable to actually do much about it. I suspect a lot of other people felt the same. But this is rubbish really; there is plenty that can be done, the trick is to keep as many people involved as possible.

Five chicken friendly steps:

• Sign up to the chicken out campaign to say that free range is fairer. There were just a few thousand signatures when I first mentioned the campaign back in mid October and there are now over 90,000.
• Buy the highest welfare chicken and eggs you can afford (there is a useful summary on welfare standards from The Times online). In the UK this generally means:
  Chicken: Better – RSPCA freedom food > Better still – Free range > Best – organic
  Eggs: Better – Barn eggs > Better still – Free range/Woodland > Best – organic
• Look out for the hidden and not so hidden chicken and eggs in sandwiches, ready-meals, baked goods and mayonnaise.
• Support a Supermarket that has made a commitment to improving chicken welfare standards (I’m not going to publish any kind of list until I have had time to check my facts).
• Buy British and support British farmers to enable them to improve animal welfare. The worse case scenario is that British Farms make big improvements and we fail to support them by buying cheaply produced imported chicken from elsewhere.

Most of the time I try to present a balanced point of view on Mostly Eating but I have too strong opinions on this to be any good at being impartial – my apologies for that! This post has also by necessity been very UK centric – if you have time to leave a comment or drop me an email to let me know what the most widely recognised food animal welfare standards are round your way I will do my best to get together a more international list.

(You can read a summary of Hugh’s Chicken Run and Jamie’s Fowl Dinners on the Channel Four Food Fight web site)