Squeaky

When I was very young and immeasurably more pleasant, I had a very soft spot for Lauren Hutton. The simple sight of her face, that smile, the dimples and most importantly the marvellous gap between her front teeth got me all giddy. She had a look of someone who was up to something, or at least wanted you to think that she was. I imagined that she’d had both parts of a Bounty Bar without having to save one half for after tea, or something.

She could even dress up as Don Estelle and look fabulous.

A few years later I re-imagined her normal expression as that of a woman who has been very recently and very satisfactorily shagging. Apparently. Probably in the afternoon.

It took me a few more years of blind adoration to realise that her face is quite wonky, beautifully imperfect. Her eyes are very slightly imperfectly assymetrical, not like she’s been using an Optigrab or anything but still. Even now, I see a picture of her smiling and think ‘you’ve just been shagging haven’t you’.

I suspect the same of my chicken, Squeaky. After a few months of wondering if he was a she or vice versa, I think his ludicrous crow has given him away as a he.

It has all the ‘just practicing’ self consciousness of smoking teenagers with the fag between their teeth, blowing the smoke out too quickly, and sounds very much like Pete Cook and Dudley Moore’s carhorn in Monte Carlo or Bust – 3 minutes in, but worth a watch from the start to see Gert Fröbe offering fine support as the sterotypical foreigner.

Having played Goldfinger, Fröbe went on to carve out a niche in films with novel car horn noises – Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Monte Carlo or Bust among them. Would that we could all have such a fine epitaph.

Squeaky has a sideways look that, like Lauren Hutton, makes me think me’s been up to something – that ‘something’ being trying to get across the hen he’s with. 18 weeks since he hatched and spent his first month in my office, under a lamp, in a cardboard box. Now he gets to cuddle up to the hen while gazing away the weeds and miserable lettuces (that he and she find so delicious) in the veg patch, fertilising as they go. She’s a similar age to him, a little over four months and not an egg between them. From she, we could have a good number of years of eggs, from he, maybe the chance to breed a few new chicks or perhaps he’ll make a lovely Sunday lunch, just like Henry. Until then, they’ll be doing what I’m either incapable of doing because of the weather or reluctant to do because of idleness – clearing and improving the ground where we’ll be growing much of the food we eat next year.

It seems like a fair exchange – lovely conditions in which to live, for eggs and maybe a meaty meal or two in return.

It occurred to me that had either he or his lady companion been a meat bird destined for our supermarkets, they would have been long dead. Indeed, they could have been born today and found their way on to your plate for the 12th day of Christmas. Forty days, from the cradle to the gravy.

During that scant life chances are they have no natural light, no freedom to walk, no chance to pick through the grass for greenery and small creatures. In almost all senses, they are prevented from being chickens.

If you have a piece of A4 to hand grab it, or if not imagine something a little smaller than your laptop screen – scandalously, this is slightly larger than the floor space that an intensively reared laying or meat bird has to live in. Without space they expend little energy, they can be fed constantly and grow at such a rate as to go from egg to roasted on your table in just 40 days. It makes it possible for a chicken to be hatched, raised, fed, watered, housed, cared for, treated, killed, dressed, packaged, transported and sold for around the price of a pint of beer. The price is a life without pleasure and likely as not ailments that include ammonia burns, leg disorders and potentially lung or heart failure. It is by most definitions of the word, inhumane. 9 out of 10 meat chickens in the UK are raised like this.

Around 850 million chickens are reared to eat in the UK each year, the vast majority in these conditions. Check that number again; we get so used to big numbers. For context, there are around 31.5 million seconds in a year.

If you can, keep a couple of chickens. The eggs are so unutterably, immeasurably finer than even the finest eggs you can buy. They are a piece of cake to look after and a lot of fun to have around. If you have a veg patch, garden or allotment, not only can you feed them very cheaply, you’ll find they improve the vegetable part of your meal by doing exacly what they’re doing in my veg patch now: clearing and pooing. I get to stay indoors in the warm and drink hot chocolate.

Once in a while, either by accident or design, this occurs.

Death of an animal is rarely pleasant, but it is part of the deal that keeps us alive. The best we can hope for is that it is swift, painless and ends a delightfully happy life.

We are quite good at ignoring that our life necessarily ends another’s. Every meal contributes to a death.

This applies to vegetarians too – all that dairy produce comes from an industry where the mothers are kept regularly in calf to keep milk production up. Hands up all those who assumed they just produced milk as a matter of course, like grass grows? Don’t feel silly, many of us do. Milk has been sold to us as OUR food…when it’s actually there for the calf, most of which are yanked away from the mother within a few days of being born. Because we aren’t a nation of veal eaters, many of the males will be slaughtered as they don’t produce milk. Maybe if Morrissey had written Milk Is Murder, more of us would be vegans. But then, most vegans indirectly kill animals too. Non-animal proteins come with their own downside – eg soya in its many forms is one of the most powerful drivers of rainforest clearance, especially now that new soya varieties have been developed that thrive in rainforest soils. It can be tough eating a vegan diet through the hungry gap without soya and imported veg and fruit, and I’ve quacked on plenty enough before about the carbon footprint of food and the damage it does, often to the most vulnerable many thousands of miles away. Point is, whatever our diet, something dies as a result.

Killing a chicken maybe a little more in your face than removing crucial habitat a few thousand miles away but the impact is no less real.

I don’t mean to make you feel bad about what you eat – precisely the opposite. Whether you have a tofu burger or roast chicken for your tea, something is likely to die – so why not celebrate it a little, enjoy it and where possible make the life of that animal better? Keeping a few chickens is a pretty good way of doing just that. It is just about the best way I know of getting protein into yourself, in the form of a fried egg sandwich.

Looking after chickens is easy. These are the rules: let them out early in the morning when it’s light, lock them up soon after dark, in between give them more outdoor room than they need to scoot around in, feed them a good feed supplemented by some greenery, never let them be without water, change their bedding once in a while. Easy.

You get years of eggs and/or the promise of a long lazy sunday lunch followed by a few days worth of leftover meals in exchange.

They’re almost distressingly easy to kill. They get dosy at night, so open their house while it’s dark if you want it to be easy. Otherwise, catch one in the day. Hold it up by its feet and it falls into a kind of trance. Place a finger either side of its head. Holding the feet up high and steady, pull down and round with your other hand, dislocating the neck and killing the bid instantly. There is one rule here – pulling down and round too hard and removing its head is better than doing half a job. Even though dead, nerve impulses may cause it to thrash around for a good minute or two to no great effect, rather like Bob Dylan does with a harmonica. With the chicken you can be assured that, unlike Bob, it won’t happen again.

Big thanks once again to all-round king of kings, chicken choker and hand model to the stars, Steven Lamb.

Bleeding is as easy as making a small slit with a knife. Plucking is equally simple.

Dressing is not too tricky either – essentially you go in it’s jaxxy end and yank out anything soft. There’s the head, feet and other bits to remove too. Easy as pie, yet too dull to go through in this already long and tedious blog.

After both you and the chicken have enjoyed its life, you should have a few delicious ways of making the most of what’s left after it has died. I like this one.

Chicken with fennel, apples and bacon
1.6kg chicken
3 medium bulbs of fennel, quartered
6 cloves of garlic, crushed or finely chopped
6 crisp eating apples, cut into six
a good grating of nutmeg
6 slices of streaky bacon
a little olive oil
60g butter
a handful of lemon thyme (regular thyme is very fine too)
100ml white wine
salt and pepper

Make sure the chicken has had 20 minutes out of the fridge, with any ties cut, before you start cooking.

Preheat the oven to 190C.

Finely chop the leafy part of the fennel and combine with the garlic, nutmeg and butter. Work your fingers under the skin of the chicken from the neck end, freeing it from the flesh, then smear the herby butter all over the breast. Place the thyme in the bird’s cavity. Smear the breast skin with olive oil, then salt and pepper well. Lay the bacon across the breast.
Put the chicken in a roasting tray and place in the centre of the oven.

As the bird goes into the oven, steam the quartered fennel bulbs until just tender.

After the chicken has been cooking for 20 mins, lower the temperature to 170C. Ten minutes later, take it out of the oven and baste it, scatter the fennel, garlic and apple around the bird and pour in the wine. Return to the oven until the chicken is completely cooked. It should be nicely golden. Test the joint between leg and body with a knife or skewer – the juices should run clear. If not cook for another 10 minutes and check again.

When you are happy it is cooked, turn off the heat, open the oven door and leave the bird to rest for 15 minutes. To serve, joint or carve.

The recipe works perfectly well with a godawful chicken as well as an organic free-ranger, but obviously it won’t taste as good and the bird you’re tucking into wouldn’t have had the pleasure, even once, of the sunday stroll you’ll take having eaten it.

If you don’t want to keep chickens or can’t, but you’d like to eat chicken that has had a happier life, the only things that can assure you of that on the label are: Organic, Free Range or RSPCA Freedom Foods. The rest – even the Red Tractor sign – can all be found on intensively reared chicken. You may fancy signing up for the Chicken Out campaign.

Over the next month or two, being as I’m immersed in the latter stages of River Cottage Handbook: Chicken and Egg, I’ll post a few recipes for making the most of the whole bird – stocks, pates, maybe even one for the feet – although I know none of you buggers will try it. I might even show you how to evicerate the little cluckers, but not in the same post as the lovely Lauren.