I get asked this so often. What do you want from a chicken? Great tasting, lean white meat encased in just enough crispy skin to give you a mildly indulgent dose of essential omega-three type fats?

Perhaps the above gastro porn is sidestepping the real issue and you want to buy meat that isn’t cruelly, intensively farmed in cages.

The answer is simple, either way. You should not buy battery-farmed hens. Nor, for that matter their eggs. For me, taste and ethics go hand in hand with meat. Intensive farming is cruel, so I don’t support it with my hard-earned money. And it just so happens that it produces food which tastes pants. So I won’t eat it.

Now, I would say beware the tags “free range” and “organic”. They were dreamed up by well meaning folks but have been hijacked by big business. You can buy free-range chickens from big retailers that have fared only a little better than their caged cousins. If the supermarket you are using sells both battery-farmed and free-range chickens I’d say stop buying any meat there, let alone poultry.
If you are on line, you have the power to buy chicken direct from an increasing number of small-scale producers. You can peruse their details, and ask as many questions as you like before buying. Not all of them bother to register with the Soil Association (which is how they get to use the term ‘organic’, even though their farms may be as good as).

At my gaff in London we buy hand-reared and hand-plucked chickens from Heron Farm in Essex. Even if you don’t really worry too much about how a chicken lived and what it ate when it was alive, I urge you to try one of these birds next time you want chicken. They are firm, dry-skinned and so tasty and juicy when you roast them that you will wonder how the sad retailed nonsense labeled “chicken” in most shops was ever allowed onto the shelves.

www.blackwellsfarmproduce.co.uk