Hugh Fearnley
Launching C4’s The Big Food Fight season: Hugh’s Chicken Run 7-9 January 2008, 9pm, C4 www.channel4.com/foodHow much does the British public care about the food on their plates? Especially when it comes to their favourite meat - chicken - that some supermarkets sell two-for-one, meaning a roast bird is cheaper than a pint of beer. Hugh’s Chicken Run launches The Big Food Fight, a season of programming which aims to raise awareness and encourage debate about food production, animal welfare and healthy eating. Running over three consecutive nights, Hugh’s Chicken Run presents Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall with his biggest challenge yet, as he goes behind the chicken shed doors to change the way Britain consumes chicken. Starting with the residents of his local town, Axminster and local supermarket, Tesco, Hugh challenges them to be the first free-range town, before asking all the major supermarkets, retailers and consumers, to do the same. Hugh wants everyone to go free-range. As far as Hugh is concerned at the heart of it all are the supermarkets whose winning combination of cost and convenience, have changed high streets across the country, simply by claiming they are serving up what the customer wants. But at what cost to the millions of living chickens? Hugh challenges the supermarkets to change their pricing policies and to convince their customers to pay more for a higher welfare chicken.In this hard-hitting series, that takes him a world away from his River Cottage ideals, Hugh learns the reality of modern poultry production as he sets up his own intensive chicken farm to see for himself and to demonstrate how cheap chickens are currently produced. Chicken is Britain’s most popular meat. Most of it is produced indoors in intensive factory farm conditions that deprive the animals of anything resembling a natural life – from newly hatched egg to slaughter weight in about 39 days.Hugh believes that the precedent set by the move to free-range eggs now needs to be repeated with poultry meat. But that took 40 years and Hugh wants change to happen a lot quicker. He also hopes that if consumers came face to face with how their cheap chicken is raised that they would be prepared to pay extra for a free-range bird. But approaching both the supermarkets and the farming industry to engage on this topic isn’t as easy as he anticipated…In episode one, realising that the only way to open up the business of intensive poultry production Hugh takes the extraordinary step of building his own intensive unit and a free range unit next to it, for comparison – in an abandoned chicken shed just outside Axminster. Hugh also meets the residents of the Millwey Estate – a group of enthusiastic cheap chicken buyers who Hugh hopes will see the light by rearing their own flock of laying hens and meat birds on a disused allotment at the edge of the estate. Not content with just speaking to the locals, Hugh also spreads the free-range word to the employees at one of Axminster’s biggest employers, where he challenges the ladies, who run the works canteen to abandon the oven-ready fodder they currently use in order to feed the staff from the warehouse with locally sourced free range chicken.
Things start to get harder at the intensive farm, in episode two, where the rapid growth of Hugh’s 2,500 chickens is a stark contrast to their 1,500 free range neighbours who get to frolic in the sunshine, as the grim realities of commercial farming start to weigh heavily on Hugh’s mind. And as the residents of Millwey start to bond with their own free range flock, that contrast is not lost on them when they visit Hugh’s experimental farm to witness the reality of cheap chicken. For some it’s more than they can bear. Hugh also gets a weighty endorsement for his aims when fellow chef Jamie Oliver pays him a visit.
In the final programme - and just 39 days after they hatched - it’s time for the chop for the intensive chickens as it is too for the free rangers at the Millwey estate. It’s a big moment for the residents who are asked to kill, cook and eat the chickens which some have come to regard as pets.
In town, the plan to make Axminster Britain’s first free range town goes into overdrive as Hugh tries to persuade not just local shops and supermarkets but everyone from the Indian restaurant, fast food shops and pubs to go completely free range for ‘Chicken Out! Week’ – a whole week during which Hugh needs to ensure more than 50% of chicken bought and consumed in Axminster is free range. But it’s a lofty target given free-range accounts for less than 5% of the poultry sold in this country. Hugh’s ambitious plans of a free-range future are not helped when rumours do the rounds in town, that the campaign is a ploy to promote poultry sales in his own shop and he realises that not everyone appreciates being preached to by someone who many see as that posh bloke off the telly. And Hugh’s struggle to engage with the supermarkets takes on a local twist after an unfortunate misunderstanding with the biggest supermarket in town.
Will Hugh manage to make this sleepy corner of Devon the birthplace of the great British chicken revolution?