food: February 2008 Archives
Ever jointed a chicken? It's incredibly satisfying. On so many levels (not the least of which is using a cleaver to chop the carcass up for the stock pot) but knowing that every last scrap of the bird is going to get used makes me feel good. Two nice free range chickens (alas, not organic), which cost about £16 from Taste (purveyors of fine foods, with a particularly good butcher), give up, four massive breasts, four thighs, four drummers and a litre of tasty stock. And in addition to all that you get the livers for making paté. For a house of three people (like what I live in), that £16 goes a long long way, we'll easily get five or six meals out of it not counting soups and risottos with the stock.
So anyway, why am I writing about all that, eh? Well Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall made a television (you remember that old thing?) program called Chicken Out broadcast earlier in January where he compared free range chicken production with battery chicken production because apparently Hugh was (rightly) outraged by the rise of the £2.99 supermarket chicken. Anyway on said show, again apparently because I don't sully myself with television, there were members of the unclean masses interviewed bemoaning the fact that they couldn't afford chicken if it was more expensive than £2.99. These people were the sorts that buy the chicken, microwave the fucker, eat the breasts and toss the rest away. Quite why Hugh bothers wasting his time with these indolent fuckwits I don't know but I suppose there are rather a lot of them. But there's probably not enough time between Eastenders and Coronation Street for anything other than bouts of uncontrolled flatulence, so again I don't know why he bothers.
So in conclusion then, I don't know about you (not being an indolent fuckwit) but quite apart from the moral and economic issues, (such as they are given that for less than 90p per person, per meal you can eat tasty free range chicken) the taste of an anaemic tescos (or sainsbury's, or asda or waitrose or morrisons) chicken is enough to turn you into a vegetarian. And fuck me that's saying something.
So anyway, why am I writing about all that, eh? Well Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall made a television (you remember that old thing?) program called Chicken Out broadcast earlier in January where he compared free range chicken production with battery chicken production because apparently Hugh was (rightly) outraged by the rise of the £2.99 supermarket chicken. Anyway on said show, again apparently because I don't sully myself with television, there were members of the unclean masses interviewed bemoaning the fact that they couldn't afford chicken if it was more expensive than £2.99. These people were the sorts that buy the chicken, microwave the fucker, eat the breasts and toss the rest away. Quite why Hugh bothers wasting his time with these indolent fuckwits I don't know but I suppose there are rather a lot of them. But there's probably not enough time between Eastenders and Coronation Street for anything other than bouts of uncontrolled flatulence, so again I don't know why he bothers.
So in conclusion then, I don't know about you (not being an indolent fuckwit) but quite apart from the moral and economic issues, (such as they are given that for less than 90p per person, per meal you can eat tasty free range chicken) the taste of an anaemic tescos (or sainsbury's, or asda or waitrose or morrisons) chicken is enough to turn you into a vegetarian. And fuck me that's saying something.
