Couldn't Happen To A Better 'producer'

Absolutely nothing on the BM site to suggest that what you are buying is produced in the UK, pulled a few bits of the site below,

Expansion has also taken place across Europe, with bases in both Germany and Hungary. Sophisticated facilities are also owned in New Zealand, where the company has been expanding within the Lamb sector, in the UK and overseas


1993 Launched in Germany and acquired the Hungarian company, Sárvár - leading poultry producer in Hungary

1994 Purchased Advanced Foods of New Zealand

Purchased Turner's Turkeys Ltd


1996 Acquired the German company Bernhard Bartsch, to produce cooked meats and frozen ready meals for Europe

Amalgamated two Hungarian companies, Sárvár and SáGa, to create SáGa Foods

1997 Offices opened in Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia
 
Get on DO but I hope before you eat the stuff, you watch the videos about how they are produced. if 160,000 birds have been culled across 4 sheds (which equates to 40,000 birds per unit), it doesn't take much working out to see how little space to exist these poor creatures have.

I'm no tree-hugging hippy-trippy chick , I am not sentimental over my animals and have no desire to turn veggie or vegan but intensive farming on this scale, whether poultry or pigs, revolts me and I wouldn't contribute one penny of my hard-earned to support the likes of Bernard Mattews et al.
 
I have no intention of watching the videos for exactly those reasons. If I went down the non-intensive road when buying food I'd be close to skint. Having said that, I only buy turkey a couple of times a year so I don't think I'm encouraging intensive production. Also, I'd normally pay about a tenner for a decent size turkey at Christmas and we'd probably get four days dinners plus plenty of sandwiches out of it. A couple of years ago I paid £30 for a goose (the feathered variety) and it did four of us one meal. When money is an issue, it's a bit of a no-brainer.
 
I am with you here, DO. I don't really notice a difference in the taste either from organic meat and factory reared stuff.
 
I'm not sure taste is the issue here, Paul. I don't like the idea of intensive production and would prefer to be able to afford more 'ethical' stuff. However, they're birds, not people. They have a very short life anyway and can't rationalise any 'suffering' they might have.

And if they're anything like the kamikaze pheasants that I regularly have to slam on the brakes to avoid splattering all over the road they're unlikely to mind a bit of close company for their short lives.

;)

Mind you, if it did taste significntly better, I'd probably treat myself and the mad squad now and again.
 
My point was that as I can taste very little difference, I wil take the cheaper option.
 
Originally posted by PDJ@Feb 10 2007, 01:48 PM
My point was that as I can taste very little difference, I wil take the cheaper option.
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Me too.

Although i can taste the difference with steak, and love not just any old steak, it got to be Marks & Spencers farm assured, sucullent aberdeen angus steak. :P
 
The whole texture of a proper chicken is different to the caged product. It is like eating meat.
 
The free-range variety is also a bigger, stronger bird (chickens like they used to be!), with really good, strong thighs and a lovely plump breast. With the poor wee battery-farmed ones, you can virtually peel away a couple of strips of flesh and find the little breastbone peering up at you. With the properly-matured bird, it's buried under a healthy good mound of firm flesh.
 
I don't tend to buy whole chickens but chicken breasts, often the "economy" brands and they taste great.
 
There may not be any noticeable difference in taste between an organic chicken and the £2.99 jobby. Being free range is what should make the difference.

I've never bought an organic chicken that wasn't labelled free range, so I'm guessing here. I'd always go for a free range non-organic over an organic non-free range.
 
Agreed, Melendez. Organic doesn't necessarily mean either good flavour or good farming practice. I like to buy organic but I am careful about what organic I buy.
 
Mel - I'm with you - properly reared non-organic chicken can taste just as good but it's stocking densities and the type of food they are provided with that makes the difference to the taste and texture of the meat.

DO & Pee - for teachers you have both really disappointed me. I honestly cannot believe that on your salaries you cannot sacrifice some items in your budget to ensure the food you put in your mouths and, far more importantly, in your children's mouths, has been properly produced. I'm not banging on about it having to be organic but have a read of the stocking rates for extensively reared barn raised chickens

What the marketing terms mean

and then consider how your 'cheap' broiler house intensively poultry has been produced, (reproduced from the vegetarian society - biased of course but factually correct in this case!):

Broiler Chicken Production
Broiler chickens are housed in large, windowless sheds in massive flocks of between 20,000 and 50,000 birds. Some flocks are even larger and over 100,000 birds is not uncommon. Feeding, watering, temperature and ventilation are all automatic. Birds are not caged and the concrete floored sheds are covered with a layer of litter, usually wood shavings though shredded paper or chopped straw may also be used.
Broiler chickens are slaughtered after just six or seven weeks (a chicken's natural lifespan is around seven years). Some chickens are slaughtered after four weeks. These are marketed as pouissons or spring chickens. A few are kept beyond the seven weeks to be sold as the larger roasting chickens.

Broiler farmers usually rear five or six batches of chickens a year. Two or three weeks are needed between batches to allow the sheds to be cleared of litter and fumigated. The litter is not changed or cleaned during the chickens' time in the sheds and so becomes increasingly wet and greasy and covered in the bird's faeces. It is estimated that 80% of the litter by weight consists of faeces by the time of slaughter. This capping of litter with a greasy layer is exacerbated by a diet which includes the recycled blood, offal and feathers of dead birds.

Artificial lighting within the broiler sheds is carefully controlled. Initially, lighting is bright to accustom the chicks to the location of food and water and encourage maximum eating and rapid growth. This lighting is then dimmed to a level of 2-5 lux in order to discourage aggression and fighting between chickens. The deep gloom in the sheds is continual except for half-hour each day when the lighting is turned off completely so that the birds may become used to total darkness. This means that in the event of a power cut or failure, panic and mass suffocation is less likely to ensue.

Birds are closely packed and have little space to move around in. The recommended stocking density is expressed as 34kg of bird weight per m². This means each bird has an area of 0.05m², similar in size to an A4 sheet of paper. As the birds grow, conditions deteriorate and the sheds become increasingly crowded until the shed floor becomes a solid mass of chickens competing to reach food and water.

Welfare and Disease
Selective breeding for rapid weight gain and the use of growth promoting antibiotics in feed means many broilers are unable to support their own weight. Twenty years ago broiler chickens took about 84 days to rear. Today, broilers reach the same weight in only 42 days. An Agriculture & Food Research Council study found that up to 80% of broilers suffer from broken bones or other skeletal defects whilst the Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC) Working Group on the Welfare of Broiler Chickens witnessed "leg problems of varying degrees of severity" on almost every farm visited. Birds severely crippled and deformed die of starvation and thirst, unable to reach food or water. Other birds may only be able to move by using their wings to balance. The FAWC describes these birds as "obviously distressed".
The unnatural growth rate of broilers together with the lack of space to move or exercise encourages the birds to rest on the wet, dirty, ammonia-ridden litter. This leads to painful breast blisters and hock burns. Hock burns can often be seen on chickens sold in supermarkets (the hocks are the upper joints of legs). Foot and breast lesions and ulcerations are also frequent.

The intensive nature and poor living conditions of broiler sheds means the birds are prone to numerous diseases. Strong ammonia fumes can lead to keratocon-junctivitis, a painful eye condition leading to blindness. Heart attacks (also called acute death syndrome), chronic respiratory disease, fatty liver and kidney syndrome and a wide range of bacterial and viral infections can lead to high mortality amongst flocks.

Heat stress in sheds can also lead to considerable deaths. Many broilers die during periods of hot weather due to inadequate ventilation.

Mortality in broiler chickens is estimated at around 6% or some 36 million birds each year. One of a stockperson's main jobs is the removal of dead birds. The FAWC estimate that each stockperson looks after an average of 80,000 birds and that the inspection of individual birds is impossible. In the overcrowded gloom of the broiler sheds dead and dying birds can easily go unnoticed. The decomposing corpses of dead chickens are often seen in broiler shed litter spread as fertiliser on agricultural land.

The unhealthy, intensive nature of broiler farms means bacteria can spread easily through flocks. Salmonella and campylobacter are widespread in broiler farms and frequent causes of food poisoning in humans.


The likelihood of well-produced barn reared chicken having the same levels of growth enhancers and antibiotics that will be routinely given to intensive broiler houses will be less but even so, when it comes to poultry, as far as I'm concerned it has to be organic and from a known and trusted source.

You can rationalise all you want to about how the birds are raised and that they don't know anything different and that you can't afford to eat anything else but unless either of you are on the poverty line, your arguments are pretty unsustainable.
 
A disease in the meat chain will kill you all. What's more, it will be a fair cop.
eek.gif
 
"DO & Pee - for teachers you have both really disappointed me. I honestly cannot believe that on your salaries you cannot sacrifice some items in your budget to ensure the food you put in your mouths and, far more importantly, in your children's mouths, has been properly produced. I'm not banging on about it having to be organic but have a read of the stocking rates for extensively reared barn raised chickens"

Obviously they are value seekers, Songsheet! ;)
 
Colin... :lol: :lol: would you like me to talk about thighs, or perhaps not on a Sunday?

The free-ranging beastie has a chance to scratch at the dirt, build up natural muscles, and eat absolutely everything. When we lived in Africa, farmers reared them on corn and not much else, and they pecked about in big fenced open pens. I can remember that sometimes they were a little on the tougher side, because of the underlying muscles, but you got about three meals out of one! After the Sunday roast chook, it was inevitable we'd have a chicken curry, and then enough for Dad's lunchtime sandwiches. I doubt you would with the feebler shed-produced ones. So in the end I don't see the economy.
 
I could very easily afford free-range poultry. I choose not to and will continue to choose not to so long as I remain convinced I'm being asked to pay over the odds for it.

I accept I'm probably also paying over the odds for the intensively produced stuff but since it costs a lot less at the checkout it's not a difficult decision to reach.

On top of that, I usually time my visits to the supermarket to coincide with the period when 'fresh' food is slashed in price because it's getting close to its sell-by date. If there's some nice free-range organic stuff on offer it'll find a good home on the Orchid household freezer.
 
Originally posted by Desert Orchid@Feb 11 2007, 11:45 AM
I could very easily afford free-range poultry. I choose not to and will continue to choose not to so long as I remain convinced I'm being asked to pay over the odds for it.

I accept I'm probably also paying over the odds for the intensively produced stuff but since it costs a lot less at the checkout it's not a difficult decision to reach.

On top of that, I usually time my visits to the supermarket to coincide with the period when 'fresh' food is slashed in price because it's getting close to its sell-by date. If there's some nice free-range organic stuff on offer it'll find a good home on the Orchid household freezer.
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;) Thats the way to do it, i agree.
 
So much for "Norfolk" turkey :angy:




Hundreds of tons of poultry passed through the Bernard Matthews plant and entered the food chain during the bird flu outbreak, the government has said.
Public health minister Caroline Flint said 850 tons of turkey, some from Hungary, passed through the infected plant in Holton in Suffolk.

This was between confirmation of the outbreak of avian influenza and the resumption of production at the plant.

"This meat was from birds slaughtered prior to 2 February," she said.

The minister stressed that no-one involved in meat processing had come into contact with live birds at another part of the site.

The Food Standards Agency said none of the meat went near the sheds where infected birds were found and it was processed on other areas of the site.

The minister said 757 tons of the turkey was from the UK and 93 tons was from Hungary - the country suspected as being the source of the outbreak.

A further 50 tons of chicken from Brazil also passed through the plant.

Nearly 160,000 turkeys were culled at the firm's Holton plant after the potentially fatal H5N1 strain of bird flu was discovered on 3 February
 
Exactly! Looks like there's Norfolkin' chance of it being anything like! Is EVERYTHING a con game these days - I'm irrationally furious over the Blue Peter con now, on top of the premium rate phone-ins (not that they affect me, but it's the principle of everything being a swizz these days)!
 
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