Campaign for a free range future

Now, I don't often do this any more. Most food rants are kept on my secret hippie blog nowadays, so you don't have to read me moaning on about raw milk or muddy vegetables, but this is very, very important, so I want you to pay close attention.

If you click on the link above you will be taken to the Chicken Out! campaign website, where you can find out the horrendous facts about the life of a battery chicken. Chickens are supposed to live outdoors, scratching around in the dust and pecking at things on the ground and suchlike. Y'know, normal chickeny things. That's what chickens like doing.

Instead, because we demand cheap animal protein and the supermarkets want to sell us whole chickens for £2 or packs of anaemic chicken breasts for under a fiver, hundreds of chickens, bred to be genetically obese, are crammed into broiler houses, forced to live in spaces smaller than a piece of A4 paper each, reared to slaughter weight in around 39 days - about half the time of an organic chicken.

Chickens that die during the 39 days are just left in the cages until the others go off to slaughter, and many of them do die, because they can't get to their food or water.

Also, have you ever seen a chicken with those black marks on its legs, like the one in the picture? Those are called hock burns, and they are a result of ammonia - i.e. because of the chicken walking around in its own droppings.

If you want more information, Compassion in World Farming have a good page here.

Your personal views on meat are probably varied and diverse (and I would love to talk about them more if you want to leave a comment or email me), but I firmly believe that if we have decided it's okay to eat an animal, we owe it to that animal to make sure it has as good a life as possible and is as happy and healthy as it can be.

Free range (or ideally organic) chicken is more readily available than ever, and it does cost more, which can be offputting, but that cost reflects the fact that they cost more to produce - because they are raised more humanely - and the superior quality of the meat.

If money is an issue, buy chickens whole (ask your butcher to joint them if you prefer) as you get much better value for money that way - Nik and I bought an organic, free range chicken for only £8.50 the other week, and roasted it (2 portions), made a risotto (2 portions) and made 3 lots of curry to freeze (6 portions), then made stock from the carcass (easy as pie - in fact easier, cos pastry's a faff, while bunging some chicken bones, an onion and a carrot and some herbs in a pan is dead simple), enabling me to make 3 lots of soup/risotto/stew (i.e. another 6 portions of something else). That's 85p a portion, not including the stock, or slightly more than 50p a portion if you count the stock. I am more than happy to post lots of recipes for risotto/casserole/curry if you like.

So, please, go the the Chicken Out! website, watch Hugh's Chicken Run on the 8th, 9th and 10th of January at 9 p.m. on C4 (and Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay when they're on as well), and, please, sign the petition, but remember that signing the petition is a completely, utterly, totally empty gesture, unless you think next time you're in the poultry aisle at the supermarket, and buy free range instead of that 'oh-so-tempting' £2 bird.

I would love you to sign the petition, and I would love you to leave me a comment saying that you've signed it, but I would love it even more if you promise me you are never, ever going to buy a battery chicken again. (Unless you're a vegetarian, in which case it's irrelevant, and you probably care deeply about animal welfare already and only buy free range eggs anyway.) If you feel even slightly uncomfortable at the thought of battery chickens, don't be a hypocrite - remember that you can make the choice to buy something else.


Next week: what the .tv suffix has to do with global warming.