Poultry excuses
Do you know where your chicken came from and the conditions in which it lived?
Feel like chicken tonight? Plenty do. It’s the world’s most consumed meat. In the US alone they eat nine billion birds a year. Chicken’s cheap. Fast growing. Religiously neutral, crossing multiple cultural boundaries. Chicken provides a blank canvas for myriad cuisines.
The culinary fascination with all things American hasn’t helped. Fried chicken joints (such as Belle’s in Melbourne and Sydney) proliferate. Chefs who once tweezered at places like Momofuku Seiobo, such as Ben Greeno, now at the Paddington in Sydney, sell hundreds of rotisserie chickens a day.
There are other examples of this mono-protein, smart-casual, chef-driven food outlet. Chicken is a thing.
But please, please, don’t kid yourself about what you’re eating when you go to these sorts of modish places (and I intend to soon). You’re eating chicken produced in lousy conditions. Not lousy literally; I use the word to keep the American flavour consistent.
You’re eating chickens bred to eat, grow and die very fast, and sometimes in poor circumstances.
As Smithsonian Magazine put it in 2012: “Modern chickens are cogs in a system designed to convert grain into protein with staggering efficiency.” It continued: “Gary Balducci, a third-generation poultry farmer in Edgecomb, Maine, can turn a day-old chick into a five-pound broiler in six weeks, half the time it took his grandfather. And selective breeding has made the broilers so docile that even if chickens are given access to outdoor space — a marketing device that qualifies the resulting meat to be sold as ‘free-range’ — they prefer hanging out at the mechanised trough.”
Australia is no different. Let’s take a business like Belle’s, inspired by the chef-owner’s time in the US south. There isn’t a pastured bird grower, or certified organic free-range grower, who could sell chickens to the restaurant at the figure it requires to hit its menu prices. The business model is built on cheap chicken, so they use the brand La Ionica, owned by Turi Foods.
La Ionica doesn’t even pretend its chicken is liberated (in 2011 the brand was successfully pursued by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission for inaccurately using the phrase “free to roam” in its marketing). In 2011, the Federal Court in Melbourne heard that each chicken had a space equivalent to an A4 sheet of paper in which to move around. Turi Foods also owns the Bannockburn brand, the chickens used at Sydney’s the Paddington. Bannockburn chicken is accredited by the Free Range Egg & Poultry Australia, whose standards defer to individual state animal welfare codes on the subject of access to daylight hours ranging and stocking density outdoors.
According to Victoria’s State Code of Accepted Farming Practice for the Welfare of Poultry, stocking density in the shed must not exceed 28kg of live birds per square metre of floor space unless there is mechanical ventilation, where it should not exceed 30kg of live birds per square metre.
As commentator and meat marketer Laura Dalrymple says: “The live weight of a 1.6kg meat chicken is about 2.2kg, which means that there are 13 to 14 FREPA chickens per square metre. This is better than conventional production but it’s still a long way from what most of us envisage [as] free range.”
For egg-producing FREPA hens, outdoors maximum density is one bird for 6.66sq m (1500 a hectare). This sounds OK. But for free-range meat hens that may get the chop at around seven weeks of age if they’re “lucky” and will venture outside for perhaps three-four of those weeks?
There are many other important criteria beyond stocking density to consider in the welfare of meat chickens. Density just happens to be an easy one to get our heads around. No matter how you spin it, nearly all the chicken we eat in Australia is from birds bred to be sedentary feeding machines that spend much of their short lives in cramped conditions in a shed, because eating from the feeder is all they want to do.
“The fundamental problem is that we are accustomed to paying an artificially low price for meat and there don’t seem to be any chefs who are prepared to take this on as a noble challenge,” says Dalrymple.
The chefs who go into these “chicken shops” buy into this sad state of affairs. And some sections of the media seem to be the cheer squad for all this fried chicken faux Americana.
So, as long as you can accept that the chicken you’re enjoying from the hip chef is almost certainly the result of green-washed industrialised agriculture … Enjoy.
“When meat chickens use only some weeks of the 10-week cycle on pasture a proportionately higher stocking density than for layers may be used,” says the Victorian code. “Any higher bird density is acceptable only where regular rotation of birds on to fresh range areas occurs and close management is undertaken which provides some continuing fodder cover.”
In other words, it’s not quantified. So who knows what’s happening?