Home | Friday 15th February 2008 | Issue 620

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PECKING ORDERS

With a four-pack of Tesco ‘Luxury Soft’ bog rolls coming in at two and a half quid, it’d be cheaper to wipe your arse with a roast chicken. While celebrity chefs have been getting busy with a campaign to boycott battery-farmed chickens, last week Tescopoly responded by cutting the price of a whole bird to £1.99 - and the media obligingly spun a story about the bold sacrifice the company had made on behalf of the poor. Low income families can now benefit from a roast dinner with all the trimmings for 99p a head – although well-heeled Tesco executives, no doubt, won’t be joining in, preferring to spend their millions on altogether more gourmet fare.

The Every Little Hurts gang have been trying to outdo Wal-Mart-ASDA which slashed the price of a chicken to £2 a few weeks earlier. Clearly unsatisfied at the £65 profit Tesco makes every second, there’s to be another dash in the ‘race to the bottom’ that is supermarket competition. And of course it’s bad news for for everyone else in the food chain – with farmers only making 2p on every chicken they sell and the chickens themselves being crammed into massive sheds capable of containing 40,000 birds, each having an area smaller than an A4 piece of paper in which to live their short and miserable lives.

Research by the Department for Rural Affairs found that more than a quarter of all ‘broiler’ birds had difficulty walking and moving around. One study at Bristol University found that the chickens, which are subject to ‘intense genetic selection’ (inbreeding have been growing quicker than ever before. 50 years ago chickens used to grow at 25g per day, but that has increased 300% to 100g today. And 20 billion chickens are bred in these horrendous conditions every year. Um yummy.

For more on the benefits of going vegan, see SchNEWS 608.

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