Cheap Chicken
Thanks, Adam, for your comment that the foodie establishment in the UK is down on cheap chicken. It neatly brings together a couple of other stories I wanted to mention. Here’s an editorial from Spiked on Line, an interesting UK-based contrarian site, called Cheaper Chickens: A Slap in the Face for Food Snobs which also argues that cheap chicken is a blessing.
I couldn’t agree more even though I have to admit that I don’t think mass-producing chickens is the most agreeable form of husbandry. The smell of the sheds is pretty grim. Indeed when I was a child my father refused to allow us to eat chicken although we had lots of free range ones scratching around for eggs. He thought they were dirty birds even when allowed to roam. But this just meant that chicken became something very desirable and today I just blank out that bit of my mind and eat the things with pleasure.
Meanwhile in Mexico, Sergio Sarmiento, who writes editorials for the Mexican newspaper Reforma pointed out last week that Mexico is now the fourth largest producer of chicken and eggs in the world.
The difference this has made to Mexicans, especially poorer Mexicans, in just a decade is quite extraordinary. Now all but the poorest can afford chicken, at least once in a while. Chicken fast food places are everywhere, some just a single unit, but many small (300 outlets in this case) chains such as Pollo Feliz that does a nice charcoal-grilled chicken with tortillas, a salad, and grilled jalapeños. Supermarkets and street markets alike are full of chicken. And eggs are also within everyone’s reach: the price of eggs per pound is about the same as the price of tortillas per pound.
It’s affected the landscape too. You can be driving in a remote bit of country and off in the distance you will see the long sheds that house the chickens. Often this is on land that is no use for crops. One of the biggest producers is Bachoco. Or here. Although they started in the north of Mexico, they are now headquartered in Celaya just an hour’s drive from us in the thriving agricultural Bajio region.How come this change? Well, it’s all due to NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. And more on that later.
….. and the chicken and eggs are GOOD! For seven years I lived in Baja CA — about 40 miles south of San Diego and crossed the border several times a month for business/family obligations. I got so that I bought whatever was cheapest or best on the ‘right’ side of the border. Especially, I bought beef and cottage cheese in USA but always bought chicken and eggs and pork in Mexico. Three or four years ago there was an article in the newspapers (both sides) about a truck load of eggs going south that were turned back from Mexico to the USA because they didn’t meet standards. Though this could have been a bureaucratic thing, it was a real eye-opener to Americans who think they are clean and Mexican’s are dirty. I had quite a few neighbors who would never, after 10 or 12 years living there, buy food in Mexican grocery stores. They were really shocked by this story.
I agree with your comments regarding mass production, but in this instance I am concentrating on people’s attitudes, rather then the wider ethics.
What I find disturbing about the debate in the UK is that is very quickly becomes about “class” (from both perspectives) and the lack of will to attempt to see the other sides point of view. In 2008 there is still a great “them and us” divide in the UK.
In terms of the actual details of the debate on ethics of eating animals, I think that I am too pedantic. I loose interest whenever I see yet another discussion on how to kill a crab/lobster (where there is no evidence that they experience pain) and not a second thought about buying fish fillets (fish are known to feel pain and show avoidence behaviour). Or the “free-range” chicken debate as I discussed before. Or not eating veal as that is “wrong”, but using dairy produce is fine (which is ultimately why there is veal on the market). Etc.
I find it difficult to get past contradictory views and I have a few of my own. I all so don’t really have the moral/ethical skills to weight up different parts of the debate. What is worse, for instance, eating intensively reared chicken or wild-caught fish? Why is it wrong for middle-class me to eat intensively reared chicken, but not a poor person in a developing country? Is finacial freedom intrinsically liked to ethical responsibility?
Kay, You and I are of one mind that chicken and eggs are much, much better in Mexico than in the US. My husband won’t eat eggs (except in cakes and puddings and so on) in the US) and orders eggs as soon as he crosses the border.
Adam, all this is very difficult, But I agree with your basic point that there is a huge (and often unacknowledged) amount of class prejudice in these discussions. I also think, along with you, that there is very little understanding of husbandry practices and a huge bambi-fication of animals. This deserves a longer response so give me a little time.
Adam, the one easy question (for me) you raised was “Is financial freedom intrinsically linked to ethical responsibility?” Of course it is. It seems self-evident to me that once you accept the existence of “ethical responsibility” at all, you also accept that greater resources (of money, political freedom, strength, wisdom, etc) convey greater responsibility. One easy example: If an eighteen month-old toddler snatches a candy from a baby, no one frets about his ethical state. If a forty year-old bank president did so, we would.
The thing that always makes me scream is the sanctimony with which Alice Waters proclaims, “Food should be expensive” without having the common decency to add, “for rich people.” I don’t think there is anything wrong with expensive, locally grown, organic food. I’m rich now, and I enjoy the indulgence. At the same time, there is something very, very wrong with demonizing the existence of cheap, nutritious, easily available food. When I was poor, I ate that and was happy for it.
Rachel, sorry to hear you’re not going to Oxford.
Hi Linwood, I couldn’t agree more with your comments. I thinkit’s incredibly hard for many people who grow up in the US, and are used to spending under 20% of their income on food, to imagine what it is like to have to spend 60 or 70% or more on food. The plummeting of food costs with the industrialization of food between 1880 and 1920 allowed millions of ordinary Americans and Europeans not only to eat better but to keep their children in school, buy decent clothing, and perhaps even a house or a car, and take an occasional outing to the beach. Not something to be reversed but to be extended as widely as possible around the world.