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 »

Absence

Still from Our Daily Bread - spraying sunflowers

Loyal visitors to the Tracing Paper will have noticed a distinct lack of activity over most of the last year. I’m ashamed that I only just avoided a clear six month hiatus with a (very) brief post about the superb documentary on the modern food industry, Our Daily Bread. My only excuse is that this blog has had a lot of competition for my attention - not just a growing family but moving house and changes in my working life too.

Return

As I start to dip a toe back into the water of blog, it’s hard to know where to start. The last year has proved an especially long time in food, with the development of a global food crisis that was almost unforeseen a year ago. Continue Reading »

Our Daily Bread is a film about the modern food industry that’s been described as “The 2001: A Space Odyssey of modern food production”, despite its direct depiction of the truth behind the food we eat.

Shot without any commentary, director Nikolaus Geyrhalter told the Guardian he simply wanted his audience to reflect on the complicated truth behind our food. Following screenings at select cinemas since its UK release in January, the film is due to be shown on More4 at 10pm on Tuesday 29th April. (And should be available to watch online over the following week - sadly, Our Daily Bread was never available from Channel 4 online.)

EU Identification Mark comprising
UK - country code
AZ020 - establishment code
EC - European Commission indication
Search EC marks with Food Tracer

To decode your food, use The Tracing Paper’s Food Tracer - a searchable list of all UK identification codes.

What are those oval codes?

If you buy meat - or fish, milk, cheese or any food produced from or by an animal - in the European Union, you should find an oval symbol like this somewhere on the packaging. This example is from a Tesco own-label apple turnover. What is it and what does it mean?

More fundamentally, why does our food carry obscure codes that mean little to the consumer? It’s all part of a food system that relies on traceability - allowing food to be traced back along the supply chain, in theory to the point of production - but provides consumers with little in the way of transparency - clear and accessible information on where the food comes from.

The oval symbol is the EU identification mark (or on wholesale cuts of meat from an abattoir, the very similar EU health mark), required by law in this form since 1st January 2006 (with some allowance for the phasing in of packaging etc) on all food of animal origin, except for eggs.
Continue Reading »