Free to roam: Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver championed chickens' rights. Picture: imageafter
It should have been the year of Chicken’s Lib.
When campaigning TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall embarked on his experiment (Hugh’s Chicken Run) in 2007 to highlight the plight of Britain’s favourite food – the battery hen – he almost started a food revolution.
Hugh ran two farms – one based on common practices in factory farming, the other on organic, free range production of chickens. He introduced a community of previously devoted cheap-as-chips chicken eaters to raise their own free range birds – and eat their charges – converting them to reject factory birds in favour of free range in their local supermarkets.
The nation began to sit up and take notice of something that perhaps they had, up until then, taken for granted; that the short, uncomfortable life of the chicken on their plate was a pretty gruesome affair.
Targeting the big supermarket chains of the UK who sell millions of cheap chickens each year, Hugh did his best to turn around the public’s perception that just because chicken was ubiquitous, didn’t mean that at some stage, the original animal that produced the nugget they ate, or the roast they had on a Sunday, hadn’t had as much right to a worthwhile life as any other animal destined for our plates.
The campaign gained momentum when fellow TV chef, Jamie Oliver, delivered another publicity-grabbing diatribe, attacking factory farming practices in Jamie’s Fowl Dinners, which aired in the UK early this year. There were books too, like food journalist Hattie Ellis’s Planet Chicken, which revealed some horrendous statistics from the US and around the world about our love affair with cheap, who-cares-where-it-comes-from chicken.
Following all this negative publicity about the way they put chicken on their shelves, the big corporations shut down pretty quickly Hugh and Jamie’s attempts to revolutionise a nation’s chicken eating habits. They correctly surmised, that given time, people would forget about their favourite meat’s fate, put from their minds the images of chickens too weak to move, with huge clumps of excrement stuck to their legs, and continue to tuck into meat sourced from battery and factory farms.
According to Jamie and Hugh’s research, the majority of the UK’s chicken come from battery farms which raise 860 million every year. Most factory farms house between 20,000 to 40,000 chickens per shed. Some farmers expect to make as little as 1 to 2 pence per bird, directly affecting their need to pack as many birds as possible into their sheds.
It now takes half the time to raise a bird than it did 30 years ago, thanks to genetic modifications which do not take into account at all the creature’s natural desire to be a bird. They are indoors for their average life of 40 days, without natural light, the period of darkness they’re given may be as little as one hour in 24, so that they are constantly feeding, piling on the pounds so that they will appear plump under their eventual cloak of cellophane on the supermarket shelves.
They can’t move very far, all they can really do is feed and rest and feed and rest, and put on this extraordinary unnatural weight.
By contrast, organic chickens are given time to put on weight, taking up to 70 to 80 days, and have the freedom to do what chickens do naturally – peck, scratch the open ground, and respond to the natural rhythms of the diurnal cycle.
The resulting meat, according to chefs like Hugh and Jamie, is infinitely better. Hugh says that it “appals” him that the amount of free range chicken eaten in the UK is only 2 or 3 per cent, compared with 30 or 40 per cent in France.
The main obstruction to converting the UK – and other nations which see it as a right to consume chicken cheaply every day – is cost. Hattie Ellis charted the evolution of the chicken from once a year treat to everyday commodity in Planet Chicken, the world’s passion for this bird really kicking off in the US where the first efficient factory farms began.
Jamie Oliver has suggestions for those who would like to reinstate the chicken as a premium meat in their household. On his website he points out that “you don’t have to eat chicken every day. In Britain, we eat meat six to seven times a week while many other European nationalities only eat meat three to four times a week”. He also suggests buying the best welfare bird you can afford rather than the cheapest one on the shelf.
It’s a matter of changing your mindset that you must have chicken, just because it’s cheap and available. There are signs that some producers are making changes – albeit slowly – and Hugh’s campaign continues under the banner Chicken Out!, which maintains a level of public pressure on the big corporations.
However, real change will only occur if every one of us rejects the factory farmed option in favour of free range every time we fancy a slice of chicken on our plates.
