Cramming Chickens Together Is Good For Us
John Mulholland has signed off his feisty first (or second) edition of The Observer this weekend, the UK's left-leaning quality newspaper. (It comes with an insert from the New York Times each week - they have much in common). Mulholland is the new editor, serving a readership based on people who write blogs, have Macs, buy Arcade Fire albums, work in the media and get given Gordon Ramsay cookbooks for Christmas. People like me.
It's not enough to see Nick Cohen's article on energy policy headlined with 'Blame The Greens...' but he's also given great prominence to Jay Rayner's excellent piece on intensive poultry farming. Your Observer reader generally agrees with the debate currently being put forward by media and cooking heroes Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall - that intensive farming is disgusting, and we should all boycott it, along with its chief sponsors the large supermarkets. Rayner raises many valid and ignored facts about the benefits of cramming 17 birds into one square metre of space.
The UK discovered food as a pleasure in about 1990. Prior to that, Brit foodies travelled to France and Italy in large Volvos in order to bring back delicacies such as balsamic vinegar and olive tapenade. The supermarkets cottoned on, and started importing decent food on behalf of the Volvo drivers. The quality of food on shelves, and in our restaurants is frankly outstanding. Our expectations, as middle class Observer readers, are somewhat advanced.
As is often the case in the UK's insular media, the debate is being contained within an audience that likes to talk to itself and not look beyond its walls. Hugh, Jamie and Observer readers can afford $10 chickens. Plenty can't - and that's the audience that we're trying to educate into the importance of a balanced diet and healthy lifestyle. Persuading the poorer parts of society to eat healthily, and pay over the odds for it, is not going to tackle the UK's obesity crisis.
"Prior to the 1950s, large numbers of people died because of tuberculosis due to a simple lack of nourishment. The wide availability of cheap animal proteins, both chicken and fish, has put an end to that," says Prof Hugh Pennington - an expert on food contamination and nutritional issues. We'd do well to remember that.
Perhaps, our brains and celebrities should be better exercised working out how we get that chicken onto a plate in a council house, served with a good selection of cheap, fresh vegetables and side portion of fruit.
Brushing aside the fact that you read The Observer, I thought you might be interested in the equally daft nonsense that goes on in the world of 'organic', where our perceptions of what constitutes organic differ greatly from the regulators', highlighted in the Weekend FT - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b8449864-bfe0-11dc-8052-0000779fd2ac.html - the great chicken debate was also taken up in a similar vein by the Saturday Fascist. I for one am grateful not to be living in the Middle Ages, from which battery chickens among other things delivered us. And, as you know, who would be a chicken in Asia, where conditions are surely much, much worse?
Posted by: Laurence | January 14, 2008 at 02:27 PM