Ingredient: Chicken
Category: Poultry
Season: All
The chicken is one of the most common and wide-spread domestic animals.
Chickens in nature may live for five to eleven years depending on the breed.
In commercial intensive farming:
A meat chicken generally lives only six weeks before slaughter.
A free range or organic meat chicken will usually be slaughtered at about 14 weeks.
Hens of special laying breeds may produce as many as 300 eggs a year. After 12 months, the hen's egg-laying ability starts to decline, the commercial laying hens are then slaughtered and used in baby foods, pet foods, pies and other processed foods.
Chickens as food
The meat of the chicken, also called "chicks," is a type of poultry meat.
Because of its relatively low cost, chicken is one of the most used meats in the world. Nearly all parts of the bird can be used for food, the meat is cooked in many different ways around the world.
Popular chicken dishes include: roast chicken, fried chicken, chicken soup, Buffalo wings, tandoori chicken, butter chicken, and chicken rice. Chicken is also a staple of fast food restaurants such as KFC, McDonald's, and Burger King.
Commercially produced chicken usually has a fairly neutral flavour and texture and is used as a reference point for describing other foods; many are said to "taste like chicken" if they are indistinctive.
Prior to about 1910, chicken was served primarily on special occasions or Sunday dinner.
Poultry was shipped live or killed, plucked, and packed on ice (but not eviscerated).
The "whole, ready-to-cook broiler" wasn't popular until the Fifties, when end-to-end refrigeration and sanitary practices gave consumers more confidence.
Before this, poultry were often cleaned by the neighbourhood butchers, though cleaning poultry at home was a commonplace kitchen skill.
Two kinds of poultry were generally offered: broilers or "spring chickens," young male chickens, a byproduct of the egg industry, which were sold when still young and tender (generally under 3 pounds live weight); and "fowls" or "stewing hens," also a byproduct of the egg industry, which were old hens past their prime for laying. This is no longer practiced; modern meat chickens are a different breed. Egg-type chicken carcasses no longer appear in stores.
The major milestone in 20th century poultry production was the discovery of vitamin D (named in 1922), which made it possible to keep chickens in confinement year-round. Before this, chickens did not thrive during the winter (due to lack of sunlight), and egg production, incubation, and meat production in the off-season were all very difficult, making poultry a seasonal and expensive proposition. Year-round production lowered costs, especially for broilers.
People who really do care about flavour have been very limited in their choice, and tracking down a real, naturally reared old-fashioned chicken has not been easy.
In this country, if you buy a chicken that is labeled‘free range’, that can mean it’s ‘sort-of free range’ because we have a kind of cock-eyed labeling law that includes three types of ‘free-range’ chickens. So my advice is to forget the words ‘free range’ on their own and look for the words Traditional Free Range or, in some cases, Free Range Total Freedom.
Issues with mass production
Humane treatment
Another animal welfare concern is the use of selective breeding to create heavy, large-breasted birds, which can lead to crippling leg disorders and heart failure for some of the birds. Concerns have been raised that companies growing single varieties of birds for eggs or meat are increasing their susceptibility to disease.
Efficiency
Farming of chickens on an industrial scale relies largely on high protein feeds derived from soybeans; in the European Union the soybean dominates the protein supply for animal feed, and the poultry industry is the largest consumer of such feed.
Giving the feed to chickens means the protein reaches humans with a much lower efficiency than through direct consumption of soybean products. Some nutrients, however, are present in chicken but not in the soybean.
British celebrity chefs' campaign to get better conditions for battery chickens: please check out the following links for the information on the campaign:
River Cottage: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingshaw's Chicken Run: Hugh's Chicken Run
You will never look at roast chicken in the same way again!.
The journey took him far from the cozy lifestyle of River Cottage and into the harrowing conditions of running his own modern poultry production line.
Jamie Oliver's - Fowl Dinners
Chickens bred for meat are entirely different to those bred to lay eggs. Industrially reared meat chickens are kept on the floor in sheds whilst their egg-laying equivalents are kept in tiered cages.
The two industries are completely separate.
Jamie took the UK television veiwers on a journey of discovery to see for themselves, how 95% of meat chickens and 63% of egg-laying hens are still intensively farmed in this country.
He wants to highlight the welfare implications for the birds as a result of our persistent demand for cheap food, and hopefully change the way we shop forever.
Check out the true cost of standard chicken in the supermarkets in the UK, here.
Jamie and asked several supermarkets about the types of chicken they carry. Click here, to find out about chicken in the Supermarkets.
Visit the RSPCA's Freedom Food microsite at www.supportchickennow.co.uk.
The next question to ask is: Has it been dry-plucked?
Real chicken does not get dunked into hot water. For the flavour to be at its best, dry-plucking is the optimum process. |