View all Food Week Columns

I have happy memories of keeping chickens as a child, although that often involved seeing them running down our drive in Weston Turville in various stages of decapitation after my father had attempted to wheedle out the sick or non laying birds.

The ban on conventional battery chicken cages, where the animals do not have the room to forage or stretch their wings, came in to force on 1^st January this year and is being considered as one of the most significant pieces of animal welfare legislation ever introduced. Although there is concern that a number of European countries will flout the ban and that the law exposes UK farmers to cheaper imports from producers from further afield who do not have to comply with the new rules, I would hope that these are only teething problems towards an eventual worldwide ban on small battery cages.

Foxes

A lot of people kept their own chickens when I was a child and it now seems that the trend is back in fashion. I was amazed when we first decided to keep hens at our old house at how many other people were doing the same. Chickens are lovely animals, although they employ a strict no nonsense approach to self preservation, and it is great to be able to hear them clucking about during the day. Ours were transferred to a rural idyll of a close friend when we moved, only to be eaten by foxes virtually immediately: always an issue I’m afraid, but a good way of introducing your children to the realities of life!

Healthy

With the forthcoming bans on veal crates and sow stalls, what I hope is finally beginning to dawn on people is that what an animal eats and the way it is kept also have important implications for the quality and taste of the meat or milk, and in this case eggs, and on our own health too. You may be skeptical about this but thinking about it logically it is very difficult to mess with nature. A lot of people feel very strongly about GM products but then seem content to turn a blind eye to eating and feeding their children on chickens that could be fed on antibiotics to make them grow. This is not paranoia; this is a reality of modern industrial farming.

There could be no better place to leave this than with Anita & John of Rent a Hen in Stoke Mandeville; featured early last year. Business is booming and they are now working with small local farmers who share the same free range values to ensure a continuity of supply as they couldn’t keep up with demand. There is also a fun new website www.rent-a-hen.co.uk where you can sign up, choose a hen and give it a name.

Did You Know?

The space available to each hen in a battery cage is often less than the size of a sheet of A4 paper.