It was the scald tank that got me in the end. I had expected trouble in the slaughter room, but we'd moved through there without incident. We'd already passed the electrocution bath, and I'd slipped easily enough round the neck cutters slicing through carotid arteries. There wasn't as much blood as I'd feared.
I had been smuggled into a large chicken factory by a meat-hygiene inspector who was worried about standards in the poultry industry. We were gazing into a hot-water tank into which the dead birds were being dipped at the rate of 180 a minute, to scald the skin and loosen the feathers before they went into the plucking machine.
It was 3pm and, as at many factories, the water was only changed once a day. It was a brown soup of faeces and feather fragments, and, the hygiene inspector pointed out, at 52 degrees centigrade, 'the perfect temperature for salmonella and campylobacter organisms to survive and cross-contaminate the birds'. We moved on to the whirring rubber fingers that remove the feathers. 'Plucking machines exert considerable pressure on the carcass, which tends to squeeze faecal matter out onto the production line. It only takes one bird colonised with campylobacter to infect the rest. The bacteria count goes up 10-fold after this point,' he continued. I found myself wondering who had done the counting.
We went outside. There, birds in towering stacks of crates delivered earlier in the day by a procession of juggernauts were being given a chance to calm down before being shunted into the slaughter room. They need to settle for the men to be able to pick them up by their feet and hang them upside down on the moving belt on which they begin their journey through the factory process. The crates are made of plastic mesh with holes.
The birds, which have typically been kept indoors all their lives – in 23-hour-a-day low light for maximum productivity, tend to panic when they are taken into the fresh air and daylight for the first time. As they open their bowels, the faeces falls from the crates at the top down through the tower on to those below. 'Pretty daft, isn't it?' the inspector said. The vast majority of the 820 million UK chickens we eat each year are now processed in huge factories like these, which combine an abattoir with cutting, packing and labelling the meat before it is transported directly to supermarket distribution centres.
More than half the UK's chicken farms are directly contracted to the factories, too, rearing chicks delivered to them from the factory hatcheries, although British poultry farmers are increasingly struggling to stay in business in the face of cheap imports, particularly from Thailand and Brazil. In the late 1980s chicken farmers received slightly more than 30 per cent of the retail price of chicken, but today they are lucky to get 20 per cent. British chicken processors, whose factories require substantial capital investment and have high labour costs, are often working on margins of less than 1 per cent. If they cannot deliver the price the supermarket wants, retailers can use the stick of sourcing abroad – either from Europe, where the high value of the pound to the euro favours continental farmers, or from developing countries, where costs are lower and standards may not be so good. It is only by keeping volumes high that conventional farmers and processors here can survive.
Two thirds of chicken farms in the UK now consist of units of 100,000 birds or more. But that makes them dependent on the people squeezing their margins in the first place – the supermarkets. They are the only customers who buy in sufficient volume. The story is not unique to chicken. Pig farmers and processors suffer similar problems. Ten years ago a British pig farmer made £9 profit per pig; in 2002 he lost an average of £3 per pig. Neither poultry nor pig farming receive subsidies. Only the biggest and most intense producers can compete. This is one of the consequences of our obsession with cheap meat. The constant drive to increase yields leads to ever-greater intensification. As the trade has globalised, the same trend is now being seen in developing countries. Small poultry farmers in Brazil and Thailand are being squeezed out by huge factory farms. It is a pattern that can be observed in most food sectors, from vegetable farming to confectionery manufacture. But where livestock is involved, the almost irresistible drive towards industrialisation has particular consequences. Factory farming in these sorts of conditions is heavily dependent on the use of drugs to prevent or treat disease. Pigs, chickens, laying hens, sheep, calves, dairy cows and farmed fish all receive routine dosages of antibiotics either through injection or in their food and water.
By the end of the 1990s about 450 tonnes of antibiotics were being used on farm animals in the UK each year – about the same quantity as on humans. Many of the antibiotics given to farm animals are the same as, or related to, antibiotics used in human medicine. And yet, in 1997 the EU banned an antibiotic called avoparcin for use in animals because of the likely development of resistance in humans to the related antibiotic vancomycin. But the legacy of using avoparcin in factory farming remains. Because the drug was given in low dosages to chickens in feed or drinking water, it didn't kill bacteria completely but allowed some to survive and develop resistance. Now we are facing untreatable vancomycin-resistant superbugs in humans. Vancomycin is the most powerful human antibiotic available, the last line of defence for patients with the hospital superbug MRSA. In 1998 the UK poultry industry said it would remove all growth-promoting antibiotics from feed voluntarily, ahead of a European ban that comes into force in 2006. But by 2003 it had become clear that one in five producers had quietly slipped back into old habits. Many producers had found that their birds were falling ill without the growth promoters, and resumed administering them. Others had switched to far greater use of therapeutic antibiotics prescribed by vets. I have seen production sheets from a large chicken factory, sent to me anonymously, which make clear that its chicks, both free-range and indoor-reared, are still routinely given antibiotics in their water.
In February 2003 avian flu broke out in the eastern Dutch province of Gelderland. The Dutch government enforced a ban on the movement of farmed birds in a desperate effort to stop the disease spreading through the country's intensive poultry units. By April the disease had spread to Belgium. Exports of eggs and chickens were banned. By the time the Germans had caught it in May 2003, and started sealing their roads, more than 30 million Dutch and Belgian chickens had been destroyed. A Dutch vet had also died, having caught the disease from an infected bird, briefly sparking fears that the virus could mutate and trigger a flu epidemic in humans. The UK poultry industry escaped the European epidemic of avian flu in 2003, but it was back on red alert in January 2004 as the disease struck again – this time cutting through flocks in southeast Asia and claiming lives as it spread to the human population. The World Health Organisation warned that if the bird virus mutated and attached itself to human flu, the consequences would be devastating. Imports of meat from Thailand were banned by the EU when it emerged that the Thai government had been covering up the fact that the country's flocks were infected. The strain of flu was particularly virulent, and The Lancet said that if it became contagious among people the prospect of a global pandemic was 'massively frightening'. But despite these increasingly frequent food scares, just wander down the meat aisles of any supermarket and you will find mountains of chicken being sold at unbelievable prices.
Chicken breasts: buy one, get one free... Chicken thighs: three for the price of two... Whole birds: half price. Chicken is cheaper than it was 20 years ago, and we're buying five times more of it, spending £2.5 billion a year. Chicken has become one of the weapons in supermarkets' price wars, but being able to buy a whole chicken for not much more than the price of a cup of coffee comes at a cost. Chickens, like other animals, have become industrialised and globalised. We no longer know where they are produced or how they are processed. By the time we buy them in aseptic little packages, or processed into convenience meals, we have lost any sense of their origin.
Extracted from Not on the Label by Felicity Lawrence published by Penguin. Copyright © Felicity Lawrence 2004. www.penguin.co.uk
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