Just recently Jamie and another bloke with a double barrelled name, both well known British chefs, have been telling and showing us the conditions in which battery hens are raised and pretty bad they are.
They encourage us to not buy these chickens but to buy free range birds instead.
I have news for them: Free range birds cost around £4-£5 each, battery ones are 2 for a fiver and for people on a fixed and limited income that suits them just fine.
Also, I buy chicken to eat and while I agree that the method of raising battery hens is pretty bad, I do not buy chicken thinking about its welfare nor does this cross my mind when tucking into one.
A chicken is a chicken is a chicken so come down of your high horse Jamie (and other bloke) you can afford free range, lots of us can’t
It’s your choice to contribute to animal cruelty so that you can have a cheap tasty chicken. I wonder how you can eat the chickens Jamie is showing you when you’ve seen how they live. Even if you don’t care at all about the suffering of the chickens, HOW can you put that in your mouth?
The electrician who used to do all my household stuff once got called in to do some emergency repairs at a huge Sydney poultry farm. After several days working there he swore off both eggs and chicken for life. He said it was horrifying.
I hope when free range stuff became readily available he was able to enjoy them again.
I started using free range only after hearing how bad caged conditions are but only last week at the market I saw the difference in price:
you could get 700gms (a dozen large eggs) of free range eggs for $4.99 or
4 dozen 500 gms (small eggs) of battery eggs for $5
so you could get more than 3 times the weight of eggs by buying tortured chook eggs. I can see why lots of people don’t see the point.
Doesn’t sound like you watched all of the programmes in question. Such as when Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (yeah, I had to google the spelling) made a meal for five out of the meat a family didn’t realise was still on their roast chicken. Or Jamie’s two similar-priced dishes cooked alongside each other, one using a dirt-cheap chicken breast, the other using a free-range leg.
Sure thing, but 2-for-a-fiver chickens are less likely to be scraped over for the other 50% of the meat, that normally goes in the bin. And I suppose, if someone with a battery chicken is aware of the meat that is “hidden”, then it’s even more economical, and reduce the demand a bit.
My thoughts on the OP:
a) There is nothing wrong with making people aware of the hideousness of the “husbandry” their cheap chickens endure.
b) Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fairly-Longname feel passionate about this subject, and are using their profiles to attempt to do something about it, which is also fair enough.
c) The more people demand free range, the lower the price will become.
All seems OK to me. I have some free range woodland-reared “Mabel Pearman’s Burford Brown” eggs that I’m just about to cook up. They’re expensive, but you wouldn’t believe the difference in taste from yer normal supermarket eggs. Bloody amazing.
It means that many of the people who say “I buy the two-for-a-fiver chickens because I’m on a budget” could instead be making two meals from one free-range bird. So the decision needn’t be about money, but about culinary knowledge and/or laziness.
There is a family of 5 close to my home, father, mother and 3 kids.
Mother buys 2 for a fiver (medium sized birds) which is ample for Sunday lunch, the kids sandwiches for school and also the carcass can be boiled, mixed with veg and we have another meal for 5 on the Monday.
So we have fed the whole family for 2 days on one chicken plus a few veg.
We still have another chicken to go at and all she has spent is £5.
Buying a free range bird will cost up to £5 and admittedly we still get the family fed for 2 days BUT we don’t have a spare chicken in the freezer.
If free range chickens are too expensive for you then you have a choice don’t you? You can buy cheaper chickens that may be raised in bad conditions, or you can decide not to buy chicken. When you decide to buy the cheaper chickens you are simply saying that eating chicken is more important to you than the conditions they were raised in. I will not judge that decision as I don’t think we can expect poor people to pay more for a product on a matter of principle when a similar cheaper product is available.
I think you’re missing the point a bit about making a meal out of scraps though. Sure if someone uses an entire cheap chicken it will be cheaper than using an entire expensive chicken. The fact is though, that many people are lazy in how they cook and may not be using all of their cheap chicken. The point being made is that those people can enjoy the more expensive chicken at no additional cost if they’d bother to learn how to make the most out of it. They will be in a cost neutral situation. They could then take that knowledge and make better use of their cheap chicken, but they are then choosing to buy cheap tortured chicken when they can actually afford the dearer pampered chicken*.
*Emotive language added for comic effect only. I have not studied the topic of battery raised hens and currently have no opinion on the matter.
The difference in quality makes the price difference worth it. The Amish-raised free-range chicken breasts we buy at the local independent grocery are about the same price as the chicken breasts at the grocery store at regular price (difference being that these never go on sale, of course), but they have no gristle or tendons or veins in them, no excess skin whatsoever, and the meat is much more flavorful. And the eggs…no contest. I haven’t bought non-organic eggs in years because of the issues with Buckeye Egg Farm locally, but eggs from the farmer’s markets taste even better than those. The smaller the operation, the better the food.
The more you think about things, the more you realize nothing in life is simple, including economics.
There are other options. That family you describe, having considered the issue, could decide to eat less meat rather than to eat chickens that have suffered.
A lot of us have grappled with the issue of eating meat, but many of us - myself included - have come to the conclusion of the wise man who asked “If it’s so wrong to eat meat, why does it taste so good,” or some such moral equivocation.
Having made that decision, many of us eat much less meat, and when we do eat it it’s organic or free-range or whatever. We know those definitions are often hazy, but we also feel we’re doing what we can.
Being poor isn’t about not being able to afford free-range or organic meat. It’s about not being able to afford rice. Most of the world doesn’t eat a tenth as much meat as the average European or American. It simply isn’t necessary, although it’s damned tasty.
Another option for your hypothetical family might have been to not have children if they couldn’t afford to feed them the right food. Of course I would never mention that if these people existed in real life. . . .
Another thing I’ve discovered, especially in regard to organic milk and organic eggs, is that they stay fresh so much longer. Admittedly, if a person is mired in the most outrageous poverty he or she would have to eat whatever came along, but anyone with a choice should consider organic and free-range simply because it’s the right thing to do all around. Sure, it costs more, but most of us can find the money if we think something is important.
The great thing for me is that Kroger actually stocks most of the organic and free-range stuff I want to buy, so it’s even convenient now.
No, I but I eat organic spinach. And whatever they fertilize it with, I’m sure they don’t pull its beak off and clip its wings and put it in a tiny cage where it can’t even turn around. I’m also sure it doesn’t suffer very much from being fertilized.