Mar 03 2009
No choice for the chickens
The best food news of the past 7 days came from a friend - about rescuing some chickens.
Kevin has kept hens in the past, just a few in his back garden where they can scratch around in the day and do what hens like to do, and be shut up at night - there are quite a few foxes about, they rather like visiting the sailing club boat park to try for a rabbit dinner and Kevin’s garden is just a couple of hedges away.
The last lot of hens were dispatched a couple of years ago when they went off laying and as Kevin was going off for an extended holiday (sailing a dhow up the East African coast), he didn’t get any more. Now apparently he has been offered some battery ‘escapees’. They have plenty of laying time in them yet and will hopefully enjoy their new life much more. They arrived courtesy of the Battery Hen Welfare Trust.
At the other end of the food chain, I enjoyed a good chicken dinner tonight, an ex-happy hen, free range and with some flavour. Very different to another recent chicken meal in a pub, which was woolly, dried out and almost completely tasteless.
I am very much in sympathy with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s ‘Chicken Out’ campaign which aims to improve animal welfare and also the quality of the eggs and chickens that we love to eat in Britain. Chicken is top of our favourite meats list, never mind the roast beef of Old England.
Yes I DO have sympathy with people on small food budgets, I consider myself to be in that category. Equally if I am going to eat meat at all, I care about how it has been produced. If you consider that a large free range chicken is going to provide four or five portions, more if some of them are child size, the extra cost over a scrawny intensively reared chicken is actually very little.
Our leading supermarket chain Tesco, remains unapologetic about continuing to sell intensively reared chicken, saying that raising its minimum standards even to the RSPCA Freedom Food level (NOT full free-range status) would deprive its customers of choice and be too expensive for them - yet other ‘budget’ end supermarkets can manage it, notably the Co-op and Somerfield.
To quote from Hugh’s Chicken Out site “Tesco is the biggest single seller of chicken and the UK poultry industry’s no.1 customer: (28% of poultry produced in Britain is produced for Tesco). There is no other company that could make a bigger impact on animal welfare in this country”.
I’m probably preaching to the converted here, and I have no idea how animal welfare standards in the parts of the world where many of my readers live compare to the UK, but I’m asking you to consider that the chicken you are planning to buy for your Sunday lunch had no choice in how and where it was reared. You can choose to pay a bit more for your chicken and your eggs.
