Anyone for battery-farmed chicken?

As most of you are no doubt aware, British celebrity chef - Jamie Oliver - has been stirring things up again. And he’s good at it! His documentary series entitled “Jamie’s Fowl Dinners”, which recently aired in the United Kingdom, featured graphic scenes of battery hens being slaughtered. Although the scenes depicting the awful conditions and miserable existence of birds awaiting slaughter would come as no surprise to anyone that’s had anything to do with the commercial poultry industry, apparently many scenes shocked viewers.

According to a recent article published in The Telegraph, sales of organic and free-range chickens have soared following airing of the show. This sudden increase in demand for organic and free-range chooks suggests to me that many consumers are either unaware of, or at least sufficiently divorced from, the realities of modern food production.

Here are some of the realities of commercial chicken meat production:

• Birds are slaughtered after about 40 days.
• Birds are reared in cramped “battery” conditions.
• To ensure birds gain weight they are routinely fed the rendered down fat from livestock discard.
• Routine debeaking, a process involving the removal of part of a bird’s beak, is used to prevent agitated birds from pecking each other to death.
• Disease outbreaks, which are commonplace, are controlled with the routine administration of antibiotics.
• To ensure they are sufficiently large at slaughter, hormonal treatments are applied to the grain and supplemental feed given to developing birds.
• Due to them being caged and unable to roam freely, birds tend to develop abnormally large bodies that are unable to be supported by their underdeveloped legs.

Birds raised according to organic principles experience an entirely different existence. These birds have the capacity to forage for food on farms rather than being caged and force-fed in factory sheds. Unlike battery-farmed chickens, which often receive protein and fat supplements in the form of rendered down livestock discard, organic birds have the opportunity to supplement their grain diet with worms and other insects. Organically reared birds are treated humanely throughout their lives and are not permitted to receive either antibiotic or hormone treatments.

More often than not, efficiency gains come at a cost. Whether it’s food quality, safety, hygiene or animal welfare, something generally has to give. While these additional costs might not be immediately evident, they are real and they have the capacity to catch up with us. Just ask anyone with a family member or friend that was exposed to BSE during the 1990s! In our never-ending quest to squeeze more out of less, we’ve reduced food production standards to an accounting number. Unit cost - an accounting concept - has become the surrogate barometer with which we gauge the acceptability or otherwise of our food production standards. Clearly, this needs to change!