Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall interview

8 January 2008 - Celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is currently featuring in the first few episodes of Channel 4's "The Big Food Fight" season which aims to raise awareness and encourage debate about food production, animal welfare and healthy eating.

Hugh joins forces with Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver in this fortnight-long season that asks the British public to think before they eat.

Hugh's Chicken Run, which began a 3-night run last night, presents Hugh with his biggest challenge yet, as he goes behind the chicken shed doors to change the way Britain consumes chicken.

Here, Hugh reveals just how far he was prepared to go to make this project and how he's beginning to win this battle.

Your latest series, Hugh's Chicken Run, is really something of a campaign, isn't it?
Absolutely. The campaign's called Chicken Out. We basically want to change the way chicken is produced in Britain. We think the more people understand, the more they'll be inclined to upgrade the welfare of the birds that they buy. We're leading with a call for free range, but we're also putting a lot of pressure on supermarkets and the industry to raise the basic, basic standards of indoor, intensive production as well, so that even if more people choose free range, the standards for intensive farming will improve.

Why is this such an important issue to you?
Well, chickens were the first ever livestock that I raised at River Cottage. They've been giving me eggs and meat all my life, and now I rear my own. And I think they're the front line of animal welfare in this country, and the way in which they're farmed is something to which the public are denied access. You've got chicken farms with barbed wire all around them, which is not necessary to keep the birds in. I particularly target the supermarkets because they sell so much cheap chicken - it's right at the heart of their price wars with each other, and they use it to try and gain market share.

Some people will be confused to discover that you started your own intensive chicken farm as part of this project. Why did you do that?
It seems a little counterintuitive, doesn't it? Basically, we tried to get access to the industry but approaches were shut down pretty quickly. So the clear, if slightly warped logic, was that if I really wanted people to understand how this was done, and indeed if I wanted to understand it fully myself, I would have to raise at least one crop of standard birds according to industry regulations. It was in a scaled down experiment. Mostly there's between 20,000 and 40,000 birds in a shed. We scaled that down to ten per cent - we raised 2,500 birds.

The fact that no intensive farmers wanted to allow you access tells its own story, doesn't it?
I think that's right, yes. At the heart of the problem is a bird which is now more or less a genetic freak. It takes half the time to raise a bird to market weight of two kilos than it did 30 years ago. It's gone down from about 80 days to less than 40 days. And, in order to do that, you need very specialised conditions. They are not the natural conditions that any edible or any fowl should be raised in. They are indoors, they're completely without natural light, the period of darkness they're given may be as little as one hour in 24, so that they are constantly feeding. They can't move very far, all they can really do is feed and rest and feed and rest, and put on this extraordinary unnatural weight. To raise a free range alternative to
the same weight takes anything up to twice as long. The minimum is 56 days, but often it takes 70 or 80 days.

It must have been emotionally difficult for you to operate in that kind of environment, given your passion for correct and ethical animal husbandry.
Definitely, at times it was very difficult. At times I was carried along by the sheer amount of work to do, and the fascination of it. There is a grim fascination in the simple business of how this is done. On one level, I had a grudging respect for people who run such farms, because they're so finely-tuned - it's such a delicate balance you have to get to produce these birds in this way. If you do anything wrong, the result could be calamity. It does happen - there are times when whole shed-loads of birds, or thousands of birds at a time, die in smothers and things like that. It's quite a fine art to prevent that from happening. But at the same time, it was an unpleasant environment to be in, and by the end it was pretty much unbearable.

On a practical level, it looked to me a far harder job than you'd anticipated.
That's right. The mechanics of it are very specific. Even for 2,000 birds you need automatic feeders and drinkers that can be wound up and wound down. You need to be able to control the temperature in the building. You need to keep an eye on the litter, and manage it. You have to manage the air movement. It's quite something.

What kind of reception did you get from the poultry farmers in the industry? Did you encounter a lot of hostility?
Surprisingly not. There's a lot of common ground there. I talked to a number of them, mostly off the record, and they're keen to work in a less intensive industry, but they can't do it as long as the supermarkets and the fast food outlets are demanding such low prices from them. Given a choice, most farmers would prefer to de-intensify. They are aware that, over the years, they've been forced into a position where their public image is pretty poor. But part of the programme is about a dialogue with the supermarkets, and that's on-going.

Is there a risk that bird flu is more of a risk among free range birds?
Bird flu is no respecter of methods of farming. If it gets in amongst a flock, it can be devastating in any system. The two major outbreaks we've had in this country, one was in a free range farm, and one was in an intensive farm, so that tells you that it can be a problem in both systems. There's no reason to think that free range flocks are any more at risk of bird flu, until there's been an outbreak very close to them, at which point extra bio-security measures can be put in place.

Jamie Oliver is concentrating on similar issues in a parallel programme to yours, isn't he?
Yes. We're both very keen to get the debate going - in fact it's already begun. Jamie is covering similar territory, albeit in an extremely different way. Jamie and I have met about this on several different occasions. In fact, he's in our programme, and I'm going to be in his. We're both right behind the Chicken Out campaign. I think and hope there will be a big public debate when these shows go out, and I fully expect there to be changes in the industry as a result.

You had Jamie come down and visit the chicken farm. What did he make of it?
He was very shocked. Absolutely disgusted, actually. The whole point of the experiment is that we had an intensive farm right next to a free range flock - we were rearing the two side-by-side. That emphasises the difference. As we walked from one shed to the other, Jamie felt he was seeing a bird he could feel good about cooking, on the free range side, and then on the intensive side a bird that was appalling, that he wouldn't dream of putting on his table.

Aside from the ethics of this issue, is the quality of meat you get from an intensive bird considerably inferior?
Oh absolutely. Considerably. On several occasions during the series we offer people free-range chicken, sometimes for the first time, and they said categorically that they could taste the difference. And the group from Millwey, the local housing estate, who we got to raise their own chickens for the series on their allotment, said that the chickens they'd reared and seen slaughtered and cooked for themselves were the best they'd ever eaten.

What was the idea behind getting them involved?
They were representative of the supermarket shoppers from Axminster. They're from the tough end of town and, a lot of them are on a tight budget. So for them it was really about getting them to see beyond the bargain two-for-a-fiver label, and getting to know the bird and getting to understand that all chicken they buy has had some kind of life. You have to appreciate that when you choose one kind of chicken over another, you're effectively voting for one kind of system over another.

Inevitably, there's a trade off for them, shopping on a budget. You do confront that issue, don't you?
Yeah, we do. It's not easy. It appals me that barely two or three per cent of all the chicken we eat in this country is free range. It should be 30 or 40 per cent, as it is in France. Many, many more people could afford to eat free range chicken. Of course, there are people on a very tight budget for whom that would be a real struggle. But at the same time, if the minimum welfare standards for indoor poultry were raised, those people could eat cheaper chicken with a clearer conscience.

Are they still raising chickens on the Millwey allotment?
Yes, it's still going. At the moment they've just got the egg-laying birds, which they're keeping over winter, and in the spring they're going to bring in the meat birds and do the whole thing again. And that's entirely been driven by them.

You're also trying to turn Axminster into Britain's first entirely free-range town. What kind of response have you encountered there?
I have to say mixed. It was a real challenge. The campaign really stirred things up - it divided the town. We had a lot of very strong support and some very significant changes in the way the town shopped. But at the same time there was something of a backlash from people who didn't like to be made to feel guilty about the kind of food they were eating. That's one of the fascinations of the series, and one of the things that made this really tough for me. I was on my own doorstep in my own town, and not everyone was friendly or receptive. It all comes to a head in the final show, but I don't want to give too much away. It wasn't an easy ride.

Read more about Hugh's Chicken Run >

Interview and images courtesy of Channel 4