The Tracing Paper

The welfare of chickens has received long overdue attention this year. Most prominent has been Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Chicken Out! campaign, which may not have succeeded in changing Tesco’s welfare policy (for now) but has evidently shifted some demand from conventional to the higher welfare Freedom Food, free range and organic chicken.

Rising demand, rising prices

Earlier this year, my local butcher (The Cookery on Stoke Newington High St) was briefly unable to source British free range chicken at all. They’re back in stock now, but the price has risen from £3.50/kg to £4.80/kg, pretty much in line with supermarket prices.

Still, it’s a fair price to pay for a tasty chicken raised in reasonable conditions. Ideally, I’d choose organic - better welfare, better flavour - but I like to use my local butcher and he doesn’t sell them yet.

Raising awareness

Kate, at A Merrier World, has written compellingly about the ethics and economics of free range chicken and is running a blogging event, Let Them Eat Chicken, to help raise awareness of the issues. This post is my contribution to the event.

Where’s that chicken from?

The label on my chicken clearly states the company that produced it - Crown Chicken of East Anglia, whose website provides some information at least on the feed, farms and production methods. I’d still like to know more about the chicken I’m planning to eat (What was it fed on? Where exactly was it produced? What breed is it?) but it’s better than nothing.

Decode your chicken

Some chicken tells you even less about its provenance but you can always find out a little more by decoding the EU identification mark - the alphanumeric code in the oval outline that should be on all food of animal origin. This won’t actually tell you where the chicken was produced, but it will tell you the last processor in the supply chain. For chicken, this is generally an integrated slaughterhouse / processor / packer.

The EC at the end of the code simply indicates that its a European identification mark; the UK or other national code at the beginning gives the processor’s country. The bit in the middle identifies the particular processor and site - the Tracing Paper’s Food Tracer will help you decode this (for example, here’s the result for my chicken’s code, 5007). Continue Reading »