Battery Chicken On Telly

[martinwa]

Apologies in advance to those of you who are already using better quality produce.

As an enthusiastic home cook and eater outer I'm somewhat bemused at the total silence this site has maintained following Hugh F W and Jamie Oliver's TV shows about the battery chicken and egg industries.

Now I know I can't expect to be eating free range corn fed organic in every restaurant in the land and certainly but what are Gulleteer's opinions?

How many of you are committed to change up to more acceptable meat products, or have you already?

Is the cost factor involved just too prohibitive or will the customer appreciate that any improvement in animal welfare and thereby the quality of the food on the plate must involve additional cost? Many of the people involved during the week seemed to be of the opinion that even an extra 50p on the price of a supermarket chicken would be prohibitive.

[thom]

Martin,

Like you I initially expected to see the media storm cross-over into eGullet as it has permeated so much conventional and online media, whether food-based or not. We talk about food here, do if an issue is big enough to get a whole "week" in the wider world surely it would be flavour of the month on here?

But actually, the truth is maybe counter-intuitive. Anyone who takes food seriously enough to loiter around, let alone post, on a website such as eGullet has probably left battery chickens behind a long time ago. In fact, most of us probably only eat rare-breed chickens with which we were on first name terms.

I did think about posting on the topic but lets face it it would take preaching to the converted to a whole knew level. At best there would be a ultimately unstimulating echoing of opinions and bigging up of each other's stance, at worst it would descend into a "my chicken is more free-range than yours" willy-waving excercise.

If anyone on here does cook with battery eggs or eat battery chicken then I can only imagine they have some perverse reason for doing so and would actually relish rattling everyone's cages by playing Devil's advocate, should an opportunity present itself.

Gosh. I'm getting to cynical...

Cheers

Thom

[martinwa]

Anyone who takes food seriously enough to loiter around, let alone post, on a website such as eGullet has probably left battery chickens behind a long time ago.

Thom I totally agree that to be true of the non professional guleteer but what of the restauranteurs and pro chefs out there? What are they buying and cooking with?

[Duncan]

I try only to ever buy organic chicken (Sheepdrove usually), falling back to free-range if I have to. However, I don't generally insist on asking in every restaurant if they can tell me the lineage of the chicken.

We were in our local butcher this morning: someone was asking about their chicken to be told: "It's grade A, so not free range but nothing like those ones you saw on telly last night. We've sold out of free range this week."

One thing I find quite frustrating about this whole chicken thing is the defensive reaction of the industry: surely they realise that people aren't going to be put off buying chicken, so the worst that can happen is that more people will start demanding the more expensive (and therefore more profitable) chickens. Whether or not people change their eating habits the publicity can only be a good thing for the industry.

[Fibilou]

at worst it would descend into a "my chicken is more free-range than yours" willy-waving excercise.

Will there be pictures ?

I wish I could bring myself to watch that programme, simply to make my husband realise why I won't buy cheap meat and eggs. He is starting to realise the difference in quality between economy and cornfed chicken, though it's been a slow process !

However, unless we all stop buying stuff like egg sandwiches, and items from the supermarket with eggs in, insist on only eating desserts in restaurants made with free range eggs, etc the free range market in fresh eggs and poulty won't even touch the top of the iceberg. There are so many foods which have an egg content in them, and the producers aren't interested in chicken welfare, just cashflow. The market for battery eggs and chickens is massive, and raw poultry adn eggs sold direct to consumers is only a tiny bit of it.

Every time we go to buy something like a pancake, a glazed sausage roll for lunch from a baker, or meriwhite, or a bun in a cake shop or an egg mcmuffin, we should really think again. I am trying to wean myself off buying anything from the supermarket or other ready-made foods with an egg or chicken content, but it is really difficult.

Edited January 12, 2008 by Fibilou (log)

[lapin d'or]

I watched all of the programmes but I was aware of most of the points they made already so whilst I was very pleased to see chicken welfare getting good prime time coverage this was not a week that changed my attitude to chicken.

I have been keeping a few hens (from the battery rehoming charity) for about six months now and I would encourage anyone who has the space to do the same. As a child we had guinea pigs and rabbits as pets - I wish we had kept chickens they are much more fun. Keeping birds for meat is something I am thinking about but as yet I'm not confident I could dispatch them myself, and that would be important to me.

The economic argument is complicated - a lot of non standard chicken does cost far more than the 50p premium being discussed. There have been many occaisions when the shops I have been in have had very little to offer between the very cheap birds and the very expensive premium ones. If the products are rarely on the shelves we cannot buy them and then the stores can argue that there is no demand. I seem to remember M&S were once adamant that there was no demand for organic food but now they have very much changed their mind.

I know people that would always choose to have more beer money than pay extra for animal welfare. I just don't think the cheap chicken choice should be available to start with and if this requires legislation then, reluctantly, more legislation please.

[Fibilou]

Quite agree with you Lapin on the dearth of anything mid range - it's either a £2.50 fluff ball Tesco Economy Frozen Chicken or a £14 corn fed poulet d'or.

Indeed, I am so appalled by the price of free range chicken that I have pretty much abandoned buying it as it's so dear. We now eat more lamb and beef than chicken. Which is probably very bad for us

[thom]

at worst it would descend into a "my chicken is more free-range than yours" willy-waving excercise.

Will there be pictures ?

←

And if there are, then who is going to go first...?

Cheers

Thom

[Fibilou]

I also do not see the point in the government legislating against battery farming in the UK without banning the sale of battery produced products in the UK - because all that will happen is that the market in UK battery eggs will be replaced y eggs from Argentina and Spain, where they have no qualms about animal welfare - which will be really great for the already kiboshed british farming industry.

[Fibilou]

at worst it would descend into a "my chicken is more free-range than yours" willy-waving excercise.

Will there be pictures ?

←

And if there are, then who is going to go first...?

Cheers

Thom

←

I don't have one so you will have to

[thom]

at worst it would descend into a "my chicken is more free-range than yours" willy-waving excercise.

Will there be pictures ?

←

And if there are, then who is going to go first...?

Cheers

Thom

←

I don't have one so you will have to

←

I seem to have talked myself into a corner...

Oh well, I suppose that as long as it doesn't look like the last (battery) chicken in the shop then I shouldn't feel too ashamed.

Anyway *cough* back to the moralities of intensive chicken farming. As you were people...

Cheers

Thom

[Andy Lynes]

On page 7 of today's edition, the Guardian says about Jamie Oliver:

"On the show it looks as if he's taking a brave stance against his employer, Sainsbury's. "I'd like to thank all the other people - Asda, Sainsbury's, Tesco and Morrisons - for making such a fantastic effort," he says sarcastically, indicating the empty seats at one table....he got a right bollocking from Sainsbury's boss Justin King, and ended up writing a letter of apology."

On page 8, a full page advert from Sainsbury's entitled "This will make our chicken taste even better." and the following quote:

"Sainsbury's has the most to be proud of on this important welfare issue." - Jamie Oliver.

I bet Channel 4 are absolutely delighted.

Edited January 12, 2008 by Andy Lynes (log)

[Fibilou]

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

[martinwa]

The non participation of the major supermarkets was disgraceful. They're the people responsible for driving costs down.

What was the figure quoted by the farmer, 20p per bird? How can that be possible?

Put 50p on a packet of fags, a pint of beer, bottle of wine, litre of gas and we'll simply take it as one of life's little hiccups and continue as before.

The comment made earlier about production going abroad though is an important one. Supermarket buyers are not in business to support British farming.

Still no response from any pro's out there. Maybe they're all in the middle of service.

[Fibilou]

My experience (a few years ago) is that, while the better restaurants are reasonably happy to buy organic/free range chicken as they can make it a selling point of the dish, and that the better farming methods lead to infinitely better meat (eg. corn fed chicken breast), they are not so happy to buy eggs, as there is no obvious link between the quality of the eggs adn the end product in, let's say, a batch of shortbread. The eggs are merely a component part.

It would be my guess that not many restaurants are prepared to stomp up the extra cash for free range eggs when you may use 60 eggs simply to make a batch of ice cream for a dessert service. "Pecan Pie served with Vanilla Ice Cream made with Free Range Eggs" isn't worth the extra spend as generally most people don't correlate pastry items with battery farming. Would you think about the provenance of the eggs used in a glaze for a beef en croute ? Probably not.

In short, trade customers will use free range if it is directly obvious and sellable to the consumer. If nobody is likely to be bothered, they won't

Edited January 12, 2008 by Fibilou (log)

[Fibilou]

oops, simupost

Edited January 12, 2008 by Fibilou (log)

[martinwa]

I will now!

[Gary Marshall]

as an ex-trade member i can only report on what we found, which was essentially that the majority of punters are price, not quality conscious, whether it be chicken steak or whatever.

I think that attitudes towards buying better quality foods are changing in peoples shopping habits witness the crowds of people i see in the local farm shops every week happily spending £8- £11 on a loose birds free range chicken, but still even they would baulk at spending £16 on the same dish in a restaurant as we discovered, we bought all our eggs free range too but i suspect we were in the minority.

It'll be a few years yet when restaurants in the UK can charge 32E for a wood roasted poulet de bresse chicken breast and gratin dauphinpoise like i had in france on thursday! (to be fair it was up a mountain, owned by the rothschilds and we were the poorest people in there by a long way!)

[martinwa]

32E for a wood roasted poulet de bresse chicken breast and gratin dauphinpoise like i had in france on thursday!

That's just not fair. I'm starving! I'd pay 320E's if someone could rustle that up for me.

[jayrayner]

I will be opining on this on the comment pages of the Observer tomorrow, in a manner which I suspect will encourage howls of outrage.

All in a day's work.

[BertieWooster]

The non participation of the major supermarkets was disgraceful. They're the people responsible for driving costs down.

What was the figure quoted by the farmer, 20p per bird? How can that be possible?

Put 50p on a packet of fags, a pint of beer, bottle of wine, litre of gas and we'll simply take it as one of life's little hiccups and continue as before.

The comment made earlier about production going abroad though is an important one. Supermarket buyers are not in business to support British farming.

Still no response from any pro's out there. Maybe they're all in the middle of service.

←

It's a little more complicated than that. Supermarkets would, after all, rather charge higher prices for most products because the margins will tend to be higher. Demand for chicken is relatively elastic; as soon as prices rise it will be replaced in the average shopping-basket by other meats (or pseudo-meats). So demand from punters keeps prices down, and the supermarkets comply for fear of losing market-share. And with three of the supermarkets engaged in a price, rather than a quality, war (even if the slogan at Asda is 'you can't take on Tesco over price', that's exactly what they're doing with their current marketing campaign) increases in the price of chickens are systemically unlikely.

However, to take a wider view, this comes about because of a lack of education. If, as is generally happening, people start to view battery eggs in the way they now view drinking and driving, and increasingly, smoking, a moral element is attached, which might affect the level of acceptable price. Of course, eggs are probably more crucial to diet (and therefore allowing more inelastic demand) than the chicken itself.

UNderlying it all is the operation of global trade and the strange rulings of the OFT. Recently, the supermarkets were fined massively for operating a cartel over the price of milk. Which they were. What wasn't reported was that the higher milk price was also being returned to the producers. I'm not saying the supermarkets were being entirely alturistic, but they were attempting as part of their policy to support prices which had fallen to levels where farmers were losing money on milk production--the supermarkets needed to keep their suppliers operating of course. This was done with the knowledge of the NFU and MAFF, to support this sector of the industry. SO, decisions of the OFT, supposedly based in EU law (but not actually), stopped supermarkets supporting farmers.

Now, milk is again more inelastic than chicken production. BUt, if we really want people to buy 'better' meat (and not just chicken, but pork, beef whatever), we have to find a way of supporting farmers to produce, fending off cheaper foreign imports, and making it morally unacceptable not to pay more for food.

If the supermarkets and the farmers came together to agree a price that allowed farmers to stay in operation and make profits producing 'good' meat, if this was combined with proper labelling legislation so that only meat produced in the UK under such standards could be promoted as such (rather than meat being re-labelled as British because it is butchered here or packaged here), and crucially if there was a major campaign over a number of years to buy British because of quality and standards, you might start to get somewhere.

Not that the OFT, and possibly the EU, would wear it!

[naebody]

I'm somewhat bemused at the total silence this site has maintained following Hugh F W and Jamie Oliver's TV shows about the battery chicken and egg industries.

←

Are you? I was delighted. I thought we'd finally grasped that it's futile for us, the converted, to start critiquing the sermon. However, if critique we must, then make yourself a cocoa get comfortable. This'll be a long one.

First up, I have nothing but respect for the efforts of Moppsy and Fat Tongue to highlight the issue. It's certainly more important than their usual jobs of telling people that meat should be rested, and that crème fraîche can replace cream. But we have to recognise that their viewers are, by and large, quite affluent and already reasonably informed about food. This is the demographic (sorry - can't avoid the word) that will have already switched their discretionary purchases to free-range, if they're going to. So a cynic may argue that the only thing generated by the publicity drive is a feeling of righteous satisfaction when the pre-converted pay some arbitary premium in Waitrose for their "organic farm raised" chicken.

What gets lost in the noise is that all food is a Machiavellian bargain. Nothing dies happily, whether it's a halal-slaughtered goat or a hand-dived scallop. We all have to decide how much tolerance we have to inflict pain and discomfort on something living, and help that shape what we're prepared to eat. Is bacon worth garotting a pig for? Is veal worth the crates? Is fresh monkey-brain tasty enough to justify the head-clamps and hacksaw? Is the life of a battery chicken a fair price for keeping a McChicken Sandwich within the fiscal reach of the average McDonald's customer? On all these questions, I'm genuinely not sure there is a definitive answer. Essentially, it's all down to degree.

Because the cruelty/taste trade-off has to be a personal decision, it's not particularly helpful when one group decides to make their own opinions definitive and impose them on others. You'll often end up with rich people telling poor people that they shouldn't be able to afford food. That can't end well.

Moving on.

Of course the majority of restaurants don't use free range (including some of the ones that claim they do). From my experience, there's nothing like professional kitchen work to erode your benevolence toward things with a pulse. It's hard to maintain the attitude of Ghandi when your day involves boiling live lobsters or crushing live mice in glue traps. No doubt the restaurateurs who post here will counter that they only use happy poultry, just as they seem to have never bought a catering pack of chips or used a tronc to diddle the wait staff. But in the average diner, it's undeniable that if the ingredient is 1p cheaper, it's 1p better. That's endemic through the industry, so we can't expect it to change without a consumer revolution that seems extremely unlikely to happen.

Oh, and to BertieW's otherwise sterling analysis above, quotas and tariffs are never the answer, for reasons best explained in tthis chapter of Tim Hartford's magnificent The Undercover Economist.

It'd be wonderful if every chicken led a happy and fulfilled life, right up to the exact moment it was turned into a KFC family bucket. I'd like to think that my own efforts - such as buying expensive eggs and avoiding meat without some kind of meaningful provenance - have by some small degree reduced the net sum of suffering in the world. But I accept that changing intensive farming would require an unprecedented burden of cross-continental, cross-governmental regulation. And while I have every sympathy for the plight of chickens, perhaps such efforts could be directed first to helping out the man who sleeps in a box outside my local Sainsbury and thinks he's still on HMS Coventry.

Right. Who wants to move this on to foie gras?

Edited January 13, 2008 by naebody (log)

[CalumC]

^

I think moving onto the topic of foie gras is something that a lot of people will do. A great deal of free range chicken eaters are foodies, and a lot of foodies are foie eaters. I personally don't know where i stand on foie gras. I've tried it a few times, and loved it, but i can't help thinking that im being a little hypocritical when I tell my schoolfriends that their eating of battery reared chickens is disgusting. I know that most foie gras ducks and geese, if not all, are as good as free range, but is the way they are produced not still questionable.

It generally seems that whether someone eats a battery farmed chicken or not is down to personal choice, whether they choose to ignore the methods of farming, choose based on price or don't really understand that free range and organic chickens do actually taste nicer. I'd like to think that this weeks programmes have educated people into changing.

On an interesting side note, my dad was Tesco this afternoon, looking for an organic chicken for roasting tomorrow, but alas there was none. At all. They had been absolutely cleared out of free range and organic whole chickens. I have no doubt that this is to do with the previous weeks programming. Not that i'm complaining, we're having duck now. Excellent.

Edited January 12, 2008 by CalumC (log)

[muichoi]

Why has no one noted the passing of the best alternative? the splendid and inexpensive French Label Rouge birds that were at one time widely available. I do buy these at some independents, and also like the excellent Label Anglais birds, but supermarket birds are uniformly awful, particularly the terrible Sheepdrove, revoltingly breast-heavy in the worst british manner. I would no more buy a battery hen than use flora margarine, and never have.

[BertieWooster]

Oh, and to BertieW's otherwise sterling analysis above, quotas and tariffs are never the answer, for reasons best explained in tthis chapter of Tim Hartford's magnificent The Undercover Economist.

←

FWIW, I do agree with you (though not always with Harford, who has some strange pre-conceptions sometimes). I'm an instinctive free-marketeer. I wasn't suggesting tariffs or quotas, but an acceptance of a supported price. Not, in itself, exactly a Chicago-economics type idea,but when it comes to food production, I feel there is a strong argument for ensuring domestic production remains in business.

For, y'know, when the rapture comes.