I Just Want to Buy a Chicken

We enjoy eating chicken and have always bought free-range, organic birds. The plight of the factory-produced bird has been well-documented over the years. Some of you may recall Hugh’s Chicken Run a TV programme screened in 2008 as part of Channel 4’s ‘Food Fight’ series in which celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall launched the campaign to encourage more consumers to demand free-range chicken. Fearnley-Whittingstall was joined on the campaign by fellow celebrity chef, Jamie Oliver, who chose to highlight the issues in the more graphic Jamie’s Fowl Dinners. It was a campaign that gained considerable traction as people were appalled by the conditions the average UK bird was reared in.

Last year we reared some organic hens specifically for meat. We reared 12, as we hoped that this would give us one chicken dinner a month. We would use the chicken whole or jointed in out favourite recipes and then use the carcass for stock. As a certified organic smallholding, we chose breeds from the RSPCA’s list of accepted meat breeds for use within their ‘Assured Scheme’ which is designed to prioritise the welfare of birds reared for meat. Hens aren’t cheap to rear (no pun intended!) as organic feed is expensive. Each bird cost us approximately £12 but as we’d had the chicks from 1 day olds, there was nothing we didn’t know about how they lived and how they died. We could enjoy our roast chicken dinners with a clear conscience.

It was a great success and we are doing the same again this year. However, last week we ate our last home reared chicken at a dinner with friends where I cooked Chicken Basque (see ‘In The Lint Mill Kitchen’ this month). It was delicious. We now face a bit of a wait. Growing hens properly for good flavour and high welfare while they’re on the planet, takes time – approximately 16 weeks as opposed to the average 35 days for a meat bird in the UK.

I was shopping in my local small town where there are two good family butchers and I wondered if they sold chicken that I would be prepared to buy while we were waiting for our own to grow. Neither sold organic chicken, which didn’t really surprise me. What surprised me was that one butcher said flatly that he didn’t know where the chicken he sold came from, other than it was from the UK and the other butcher claimed vaguely that it came from Dumfries – more than that he could not say. I felt pretty despairing that despite all the campaigning over the years we are very little further on in being able to buy our food with confidence as to how it is reared.

It seems to me deeply shocking that in Tesco you can buy a Willow Farm Whole Chicken 1.2-1.6kg for £3.22. This brings me to another hobby horse of mine – fake farms! Willow Farm does not exist. What does exist is a giant corporation called Avara Foods who currently face a multi-million pound legal case over pollution of the River Wye. In a brilliant article in Wicked Leeks called ‘Fake Farms & Ugly Truths’, Rob Percival, Head of Food Policy at the Soil Association had this to say,

‘People are going into Tescos purchasing Willow Farm chickens supplied by Avara and not knowing that these products are potentially contributing to the destruction of this river. Fake farm brands give the sense of wholesome, small-scale production, masking the reality of industrial systems that produce so much of our groceries.’

We know we are very privileged to live at The Lint Mill and to be able to rear our own food but it takes determination, hard work and vigilance. So often we feel we are working against the odds and sticking to our principles can be really tricky to navigate at times.

We rarely eat out but last night, after attending a screening of Isabella Tree’s Wilding we decided to have supper at the new Hendersons. It originally opened in 1962, and was one of Edinburgh’s longest running restaurants, and the UK’s longest running vegetarian restaurant. Founded by Janet Henderson and now re-opened post-Covid by her grandson Barrie, it meant that we could eat delicious, organic food without worrying about where the meat had come from.

Every time someone asks a retailer where their food is from gives the retailer pause for thought – so ask. Little by little we can mend our broken food system.