Brits have a growing appetite for cheap chicken—and it is impacting our health, our environment and causing birds to suffer on an industrial scale. That’s one message in the hit Netflix documentary Big Chicken by comedian Mo Gilligan. Yet, despite all these red flags, our government is cooking up a plan to grow the industry.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is developing a “poultry sector growth plan”, which would address “barriers to growth” such as “planning and regulatory processes”. It sounds like a poultry producer’s dream, which makes sense when you discover that they’re heavily involved in the process.
Defra told me the plan is being driven by representatives from the British Poultry Council, National Farmers’ Union, British Egg Industry Council, British Free Range Egg Producers Association, and the Association of Independent Meat Suppliers. Minutes from a recent meeting reveal that the founder of major poultry producer 2 Sisters Food Group, Ranjit Singh Boparan, has also lent “his expertise to the commissioning” of the plan.
So much about the idea of producing more chicken seems wrongheaded. The government’s Land Use Framework—which is meant to be “a blueprint for smarter, more informed decisions” for how we use our land—says it will develop a poultry sector growth plan “to strengthen domestic production and maintain food security”. Yet describing poultry produced here as “domestic production” requires some magical thinking. The birds might be getting fat or laying their eggs in UK buildings, but much of their feed comes from overseas. In fact, this reliance on feed from abroad, often from a handful of companies importing soy from South America, poses a risk to our food security.
The government’s own national security assessment on global biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, published in January this year, stresses the risk of increasing crop failures globally. It says that “animal farming at current levels is unsustainable without imports [of feed]” and that “the UK does not have enough land to feed its population and rear livestock: a wholesale change in consumer diets would be required.” A plan to produce more chickens in Britain could make us even more dependent on these imports.
You only need to look at the parched fields this summer to see that climate change is undermining our ability to grow crops here, too. Harvests are down, and food prices are expected to rise as a result. Getting serious about our food security means adapting our diets so that we are making the most of our land—or, as the Land Use Framework advises, producing food more sustainably from less land.
The obvious way to achieve this would be to produce less meat: some crops we feed to animals could feed people directly, far more efficiently. Currently, 85 per cent of the agricultural land—here and abroad—that feeds the UK is used for grazing and crops grown for animal feed, but this supplies just 32 per cent of our calories. We should be growing and consuming more beans and pulses for protein, to benefit our health and make our food system more resilient. Both the National Food Strategy and the independent Climate Change Committee (CCC) have recommended that we significantly reduce our meat consumption.
Politicians are understandably reluctant to be seen to be telling people what to eat, but they could learn something about communication from Gilligan. The comedian admits, with some unease, that he’s been “part of the problem”: he finds fried chicken delicious, loves eating it and has even voiced an advert for Nando’s. But as he learns more about the intensive poultry industry through reporting the documentary, he is drawn to eat less.
The government may be tempted to blithely follow rising consumer demand, but it could instead help shape demand by empowering consumers with clear information about where their food comes from. Honest labelling is the place to start. It’s already happened with eggs: those from higher-welfare chickens had always been differentiated with “organic” or “free-range” labels, but when the EU made it mandatory for all eggs to be labelled with their method of production, others had to be labelled “eggs from caged hens”. The hidden became visible. Buyers switched their allegiances and sales of caged eggs plummeted. All it took was the truth to be clearly stated on the label.
I suspect introducing similarly clear labelling for meat and dairy products would also dampen demand. If supermarket chickens carried a label communicating that they came from an intensive indoor system, would so many buy them? These birds are crammed into buildings with tens of thousands of others and never go outside in their short lives. The industry doesn’t like to show this reality because consumers don’t approve. Even the Head of the British Poultry Council declined to meet Gilligan at one of the farms he represents, instead opting to be interviewed at a picturesque petting farm in Hackney.
The industry can’t keep consumers in the dark forever. Animal advocacy campaign Project Slingshot currently has adverts on the London Underground alerting commuters to the horrors of “Frankenchickens”, which lexicographer Susie Dent recently defined when she made it her “word of the day”: “This term is of course rooted in Frankenstein, the laboratory monster forced into a grotesque unnatural existence much like the average factory farmed chicken that is bred to double in size every few days until their legs break, their heart fails or they’re slaughtered at 35 days old.”
Chicken farming doesn’t have to be like this. The Better Chicken Commitment, an animal welfare pledge, implores companies to move to slower-growing breeds and give the birds more room to move. Even better are free-range and organic systems, while the Soil Association, a charity, advocates for integrating chickens into mixed, nature-friendly farms.
Such changes would also curb the industrial quantities of muck—often more than the surrounding land can absorb—that intensive poultry farming creates. Anti-pollution campaign group River Action is calling on Nando’s and other brands to account for all the manure in their supply chains to ensure it doesn’t pollute our rivers. It also has a petition urging the government to stop expanding poultry production.
A government concerned about food security, animal welfare and our wider environment should be seeking to grow fewer but better-quality chickens. If we leave the poultry industry in charge of our poultry strategy, it could grow as bloated and unhealthy as a Frankenchicken. And as Gilligan has shown us, we all have a stake in something better.
