Fowl Play?

This week, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver have been doing their bit for chickens. We eat over 850 million of them each year in the UK and now their plight is being brought to the attention of the nation as two of our famous chefs come to the rescue.

For anyone unfamiliar with the life of a humble chicken – the none free range variety – a summary of their short existence goes something like this: Hatched in incubators in the factory, they are then dispatched down the conveyor belt, boxed into a van from where they are emptied into a barn, fed and watered without natural daylight, pumped with antibiotics to avoid disease, culled if they show weakness, reared for 39 days then slaughtered and prepared for the supermarket shelf. Of course, most of this takes place behind closed doors and now the public is slowly being wakened to their plight by a series of television shows. So what are we to make of it?

I like my chicken so ought I to care how it arrives on my plate, or simply look for the best bargain when out shopping? In Jamie’s programme, he went on to tell us that the British poultry farmer gets 3p – yes, 3 pence for every bird produced under intensive farming methods. That in itself has got to be a clue that somewhere, something is not right. We also got to see the different methods of farming on offer and, how ultimately, the way the chicken is reared is determined by consumer demand. That’s right, the plight of the chicken is in the hands of you and me.

It appears that somewhere along the way we have become so detached from the process of rearing life stock that the meat we see wrapped in cling film in the fridges has little connection with a real life animal earlier in the food chain. This detachment means that our conscience is not involved and therefore our choice is determined by only one factor – price. When faced with the reality of the process taken to provide us with whole chickens, plucked, prepared and giblets removed, we might start to think differently or at least that seemed to be the conclusion of the programme.

Outside of enjoying some time off this Saturday I was also left with final preparations for my sermon at Charis on the Sunday as well as writing my blog. The sermon includes this statement from Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians, ‘from the beginning God chose you to be saved…’ and my blog is about chickens! Now that’s diversity for you – or is it? Does God care for chickens, and should I care? Well, my sermon looks at the issue of God choosing us to be saved. Therefore, I go on to ask the obvious questions, saved from what and for what? I conclude that biblically we are saved for three things: to have a relationship with God, to receive eternal life and also to be reconciled with creation. Now, if we are to be reconciled with creation then our care for creation becomes a priority and surely that must have implications for the way in which we breed animals for food. Or at least it is appearing that way to me. We are not here to abuse the earth, but act as stewards of it, and that being the case it may well affect my pocket, and my spending habits too which could result in a better life for the chicken before it finally ends up on my dinner plate.