The Schalter

Written by: Stephen Gray

I had a Vauxhall Corsa for a while. It was a russety-orange colour, had a tendency to produce some pretty acrid smells, moved jerkily and since we parted ways now sits outside a house in Hertfordshire. It also ran entirely on water, layers pellets and the occasional handful of corn. Vauxhall Corsa was (still is, come to think of it) a capriciously-named chicken.

Timorous and demanding by turns, she was not exactly brimming over with personality. Still, while I wouldn’t expect witty badinage with her over port and cheese there were enough idiosyncrasies to mark her out from the other hen, the more sympathetically-named Elodie. With plenty of space to run around and a good natural diet, she produced some fantastically tasty eggs. While I have a soft spot for the bustlingly comic hen, I’m no militant campaigner. Through my love of Caesar salads, the occasional curry and roast dinners I’ve been responsible for the demise of a lot of fowl.

Still I was concerned when I caught a tabloid headline last weekend decrying Delia Smith’s ‘support’ of battery farming chickens. Surely not? As it turns out, maybe not. The comments were made on Radio 4 in a spot plugging her new book (an odd tome: a cookery book whose central theme is minimising actual cooking, but fair play to her if it sells) and, as the imbroglio surrounding our Archbishop should have shown anyone planning on speaking publicly on a controversial issue, the slightest ambiguity will set alight the keyboards of erstwhile Fleet Street denizens. The helpful, and, let’s face it, probably overwhelmed, people at Delia Online provide readers of the ‘Coffee Break’ forum with a verbatim transcript:

” ‘I certainly don’t like the way battery chickens are reared, and I have put in my book ‘use free-range chickens’. I’m aware that we still have a lot of poverty - particularly among children - in this country and I feel that’s a disgrace and that somehow or other we have to make sure everyone has enough nutritious food to eat’.

I hope this clear up the confusion that keeps being repeated that Delia supports battery farming. She doesn’t.”

If her comments had been clear, that two-word rejoinder wouldn’t have been necessary. But whatever, this isn’t a deconstruction of Delia’s rhetoric. In fact, this isn’t really about Delia. Because as Rowan Williams has been finding, through these peepholes of ambiguity we’re witness to a world of strong feelings, misinformation, apathy, accusations and rampant moralising.

You could see it as a clash of cultures. Delia, good grub no nonsense Norwich supporter, up against a Land Rover-driving chicken-stroking Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall type figure. Basics pitted against organic. Peas flown in fron Kenya in midwinter vs food miles. Delia’s comments taken as giving voice to the underdog grocery consumer who resents their hand being forced toward the free-range egg, the British lamb, the organic broccoli, the expensive stuff. And why should they be? Simply because it’s in vogue?

It reminds me of a famous philosophical blunder. It was the 19th Century and the usually reliable John Stuart Mill was trying to prove that happiness had value and was worth pursuing. His attempted proof: Things are audible because they are heard, things are visible because they are seen, things are desirable because they are desired, and people desire happiness, so it is desirable. It’s a quirk of the English language that ‘desirable’ does not always mean ‘able to be desired’ in the same way that ‘visible’ means ‘able to be seen’. Just because something is able to be desired this emphatically does not mean it is desirable, which is where Mill dropped the ball. It’s strange to think it, but this fatal logical flaw languished for years in ‘On Virtue and Happiness’ before it was pointed out after Mill’s death by G.E. Moore. If I see a theft, the theft is visible, but if I desire to steal something, that doesn’t make stealing desirable. Just because some people want to go organic/free-range/biodynamic doesn’t necessarily mean any of these are good, and just because some want produce the cheapest it can be, this isn’t necessarily good either.

On the free-range poultry debate, I’m picking a side. I’m picking free-range, and not just because of old Vauxhall. To explain why, I’d like to take you, virtually, to the poultry aisles of a well-known national supermarket.

There is a selection of own-brand skinless chicken breasts on offer. There’s the no-frills meat, the nondescript mid-priced, and the free-range. Prices per kilogramme for the first two, respectively, are £6.63 and £7.46. The free-range equivalent is £14.25/kg. But, and this diminishes the argument from expense, you can buy free-range chicken breasts which have not been skinned for £11.42/kg. You just remove the skin at home, and trust me, it takes seconds to pull it off.

Let’s say you want two chicken breasts, in total about 300g of meat. No-frills, £1.99. Mid-price, £2.24. Free-range, £4.28. But free-range unskinned, £3.47. Of course, it’s always going to be more money, but it’s not a huge amount if you take this option. Furthermore, when sold by the kilogramme, you can opt for a slightly smaller amount and find yourself spending almost the same amount. This is how I bought, and still buy, free-range as a student on a budget. It doesn’t work quite as well with whole birds: £2.29/kg for standard own-brand medium chicken, £3.99 for a free-range. A 2kg chicken will set you back £4.58 or £7.98, a difference of £3.40.

One of the more interesting things to note is that these aren’t just birds kept indoors or outdoors. The basic and standard poultry comes from the Ross 308 chicken, however much that reminds you of a 60s bubble car, and the free-range from a more ducal-sounding Devonshire Red. The latter is a slower-growing, so more expensive, bird.

As for the birds themselves, the indoor Ross 308 lives for about 39 days in conditions where not more than £38kg of birds may occupy a square metre in the house (an EU-imposed limit). The RSPCA has pointed out this gives a 2kg bird less ground space than an A4 sheet of paper. The Ross 308 is a broiler producd by the Aviagen company which supplies other big-name supermarkets. It has been engineered so as to mature in about six weeks and produce abnormally large chests, to supply the more popular breast meat. The stresses of heat, lameness, immature bones and organs, disorders caused by the abnormality of growth all lead to a pretty grim situation in the chicken house. Broilers also have a tendency to die in the fray. The Devonshire Reds in our virtual supermarket’s source farms aren’t housed more than 30kg (or no more than 19 chickens) to a square metre and have access to the outside world. They live for 59 days before they reach maturity, growing at a much more normal rate. All for a few pounds more.

There are a lot of people, some of whom can be found at Delia Online, who object on grounds of price. They’re bargain hunters, students or mothers of children - plural, always plural. They can’t afford the premium. In my first couple of years at university I bought standard supermarket chicken until I realised how small the free-range premium could be and how unpleasant the living conditions really were for broilers. Something in me got uneasy at the prospect of a chicken being put through 39 days of this so that I can shave a couple of pounds off my shopping bill. When I was having a bad week with money (and believe me, I had bad weeks with money), I stopped buying chicken. It was a luxury, not a necessity, and it still is. I am continually surprised at the moment by the number of people who urgently, desperately cannot afford an £8 chicken for their Sunday lunch, but need the £2 option sold by the lower-quality supermarkets. I don’t deny some people are in this situation, but the sheer prevalence of people without £6 to spare stretches my credulity. I’d conjecture that were free-range products to become the only option, that £6 could be found.

But I don’t like to get militant, and I don’t like to assume. Still, for those really, genuinely hard up I still don’t think the excuse is good enough to treat chickens so poorly. The equivalent price of a two broiler chicken breasts from our virtual supermarket will buy you: a third of a kilo of King Edward potatoes, a bulb of garlic, an onion, a third of a kilo of cherry tomatoes and the same again of broccoli. You could make a nutritious vegetable bake from these ingredients. Oh, and have a good few bananas for pudding. I’m not suggesting these people won’t eat. I do this all the time. All I’m suggesting is that the difference of a few pounds is not sufficient to warrant putting a chicken through such an unpleasant life.

The good news is that standards are improving, and they should have reached their 39kg/m2 nadir. While genetic engineering means it now takes half the time to raise a chicken that it did in the 50s, there is a tendency to move back towards kinder conditions. As this becomes more widespread, the relative cost to the consumer should go down. In the meantime the payoff for those extra few pounds for a kinder, better-tasting meat seems completely worth it to me. I won’t be putting bricks through battery farmers’ windows or throwing drinks over anyone who disagrees, but I do think the issue is less the harm that would be done to our wallets and more our disinclination to rein ourselves in a bit for the benefit of animals when there are pounds at stake. I’d desire us all to start doing it - because I think it’s almost certainly desirable.

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This post is tagged Celebrity Chefs, Culture, Food, Organic