I make it no secret that I like chicken. I want to keep chickens when I flee the nest, so to speak. I make a point of purchasing free range eggs and wince when I see others buy value, battery farmed eggs. I avoid eating at KFC, despite really liking the taste of fried chicken because it it alledged that they mistreat their chickens. I only buy mayonnaise and pasta from Marks & Spencer so I know that they are produced using free range ingredients.

I also start far too many sentences with I.

But what have my shopping habbits and desire to someday become a small scale 'urban farmer' got to do with anything? Well, I’m facing a dilemma. How can I continue to purchase chicken meat from battery farms when I’m so against them?

Ultimately this comes down to finances, which is a notorious issue not least for poor students. Free Range chicken costs more and rightly so. It costs more to produce free range chickens not just because they take up more room but because they take up the room for much longer. A normal, free range chicken should take roughly ten to twelve weeks to grow to a saleable size. Their battery farmed cousins however take only five or six weeks. This might not sound so bad. But it is. They take such a short period of time to grow because they’ve been selectively bred by humans to do exactly that. In the same way they’ve been bred to lay more eggs than they can truly cope to produce. This fast growth causes the chickens to become disfigured and many develop arthritis. Not a nice existance for anyone. Especially if your existance involves being crammed into a warehouse or a cage, and standing on layer upon layer of feaces.

However this dilemma has been somewhat sorted by the brilliant Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and the first episode of his new series, River Cottage Treatment, which I’ve just had the joy of watching. It would appear it can actually be cheaper to cook meals from scratch with free range chicken than buy ready meals or oven ready dishes such as kievs and nuggets. Obviously this would be even cheaper with battery farmed chicken but then there’s really no point apart from the financial perspective of course. This is all possible by using the chicken more effectively. Leftover pieces of chicken can be easily used to make chicken stock, which is something I buy pre made to make soup with anyway.

So from now on it is my intention to only buy free range chicken. I hope this brief post may help you come to a similar decision. If not then I urge you to find out more information online on the subject. Or at the very least take a look at some of the pictures online of battery farmed chickens clinging to life. It’s not nice but then again neither is what we are doing to these poor birds.

Labels: battery farming, broiler chicken, formby, free range chicken, free range eggs, hugh fearnley whittingstall, matthew watson, river cottage treatment