The politics of poultry
Part 6 of commodities vs. just food
Most people eat a lot of chicken, whereas our general philosophy is ‘don’t kill the goose that lays the golden egg.’ Poultry epitomises the industrial food system. Just a couple of generations ago, people ate chicken once a year for the Christmas roast. By the time our parents’ generation was serving dinner, it had become the Sunday roast. From once a year to once a week, chicken is now the most consumed meat in Australia, at over 44kg per capita per year (compared with about 22kg of beef and pork each, and 10kg of lamb).
How did this happen? By intensifying production and growing animals selectively bred to reach an average of 2.8kg in just 42 days in vast sheds, rather than letting them express their natural behaviours and forage for a diverse diet outside. They grow so fast that they often cannot carry their own weight, developing blisters on their breasts from sitting in their own waste for the last couple weeks of their short lives, and fracturing legs unable to tolerate the extreme muscle growth on that same breast.
Compounding the terrible ethics of modern poultry rearing is the fact that most chickens are grown under contract for just two companies in Australia: Baiada (who own Steggles and Lilydale Free Range) and Ingham’s, who collectively control 70 per cent of the Australian poultry market. The contract farmers carry the cost and risk of the buildings and equipment, but the companies own the birds and feed, paying the farmers as little as 60-80 cents per bird. As with CAFO pork and feedlot beef, they are also grown on copious amounts of monoculture grain, with devastating environmental impacts in Australia and elsewhere where it is grown.
As if this wasn’t all enough to stop you buying industrial chicken, there’s the ever-increasing rise of disease outbreaks, including novel forms of avian influenza, some zoonotic (passing from poultry to humans with often deadly consequences). Sheds full of immuno-compromised genetically homogeneous animals are what my comrade Rob Wallace, evolutionary epidemiologist and author of Big Farms Make Big Flu and Dead Epidemiologists (of which I am a minor co-author) calls ‘food for flu.’
For all the reasons above, we eat chicken sparingly, and we only eat young roosters and spent hens we kill here on the farm. We started this practice when we were still in the city, when raising day old chicks for our layers. Some turned out to be roosters, so we learned how to kill a chicken, and we have never looked back. You can read that story from 2010 on my old blog Tammi Jonas: Food Ethics (how little I knew back then!).
Hierarchy of decisions
GROW: If you have room to grow your own chickens, choose heritage breeds that are dual purpose. You won’t necessarily get an egg every day from them, but you will get a tastier bird with more meat on it than the industrial Isa Browns most people keep for eggs.
BARTER: People who raise chickens quite often have surplus roosters if they hatch their own or buy day old chicks. Many are not adept at killing and cooking them, and are happy to send roosters your way for you to dispatch as you please. This in itself is a good barter - you deal with a surplus they don’t want to process, and you get fed.
BUY: Just give up chicken unless you can find a local farm raising them on pasture and selling directly. I can’t get behind any of the certification schemes for the frankenbirds produced at scale.
Read like the Jonai
The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business, by Christopher Leonard, 2017. Simon & Schuster.
One chook makes three meals
Whether you are killing a young rooster or an old spent hen will determine stage one of your three meals. For us anything under six months is young, and though heritage breed chooks raised on pasture will be more toothsome than those awful Ross-Cobb frankenbirds sold in the supermarket, we are happy to chew our food. Typically, we’ll either roast or brine and deep fry a young bird, or we will go straight to boiling an old one. In the younger bird’s case, we keep the bones and make stock next, and finally use up the leftovers (if there are any) in either sandwiches or pasta. In the case of the older bird, we pull the meat off the frame after boiling it for a few hours.
An old favourite is tortellini en brodo, as it encapsulates the full ethos of waste nothing when you cook the shredded meat in the pasta in broth made from the same bird’s bones.
BROILER HEN AND ROOSTER LITERACY: you can tenderise an old bird if you’re keen to fry it. The best method is to salt brine it for 24 hours, then joint and confit overnight in pork fat at 100C. A quicker method is to brine and then pressure cook the bird. Atticus is fond of looking after friends by turning up with freshly killed chickens and the pressure cooker to make delicious fried chicken.
[NB This is an excerpt from my cookbook Eat Like the Jonai: Ethical, ecologically sound, socially just, and uncommonly delicious - for sale on our website. The anarchist’s-handbook-disguised-as-a-cookbook is a fundraiser for our on-farm collective micro-abattoir.]