I had an interesting day out last weekend on the Horowhenua
Taste Trail, where a handful of Horowhenua food producers--Horowhenua is a
region in New Zealand--opened their doors and offered factory tours, tastings,
and such to the public. At some venues, various restaurants and chefs had set
up to offer “tasting plates” made with the products. The idea of this annual
event is to share with ordinary people the “paddock to plate” process.
I drove up to the town of Foxton for my first venue, and
started there with a visit to Turk’s chicken. Now I don’t think a chicken
factory is a happy place, but I do think knowing where food comes from is important
knowledge. Still, this is truly red pill, blue pill territory, or to quote the
government propaganda in George Orwell’s novel 1984, “Ignorance is Bliss”. Not
everybody wants to know, or cares to see.
Turks produces corn-fed (not GMO corn) free-range “premium” chicken
and chicken products that are sold primarily around the North Island of New Zealand.
They are a local company employing over 200 workers and contractors in the
operation, so they are a major employer in this small, rural town. They process
around 125,000 chickens a week.
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| 38 day old Turk's chickens |
We didn’t get an opportunity to see the free-range chickens in
the barns and paddocks run by Turks’ contractors, but at the entrance as we
went in, they showed us a few chickens: first a bunch of fluffy yellow
2-day-old chicks you could pick up, and then some larger birds in a larger pen that
were 38 days old: grossly overweight, and somewhat featherless, two days short
of slaughter. Given the chickens are kept in barns until they are 3 weeks old, and
they are killed just shy of 6 weeks’ old, their “free-range life” outdoors is pretty
short. You can see more about the barns and outdoor spaces, and learn about the
company, in this clip from the tv show “Rural Delivery”.
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| In the Turks factory, sample chicken (not a working day) |
On tour inside the factory (they don’t operate on weekends),
we viewed a huge and efficient, spotlessly clean stainless steel processing plant,
and in each room workers explained what they do and what the various machines
do. This is a big factory, highly automated, and Turks workers are clearly proud
of the efficiencies they have in butchering, marinating, processing, bagging,
packaging, and boxing their premium products, in whatever cuts and sizes their
customers request. Once the breast meat has been removed and the legs and
thighs and wings (nibbles) cut off, a machine extracts all the “meat” from
stripped carcasses for human consumption, and that will be formed into various chicken
products like nuggets and patties and sausages; the residual bone material is ground
and extracted for use in pet food. Nothing goes to waste. In the small goods
room they have smokers for smoking chicken and chicken sausages. In another
room, they mix marinades, bag, and box. It’s all very clinical and efficient,
designed to produce a variety of safe chicken products for the commercial
market.
Outside the factory, the barbeques were going full-bore with
generous samples of barbequed chicken breast pieces prepared with various
marinades, sizzling hot off the grill, available on platters, free for
sampling. I must confess that my appetite for chicken, low to begin with as I’m
mostly vegetarian, had pretty much disappeared by this point (though it was
lunch time), but in the spirit of the event, I tried a couple of pieces.
From the Foxton Turks factory I drove south to the town of
Levin, and set off to explore more about chickens at the Ultimate Egg Company.
This free-range egg “factory” gets an SPCA blue tick, and an SPCA lady was
there talking to visitors about chicken welfare, and showing examples of the cramped
single and colony cages used on some farms (not this one). All of The Ultimate
Egg Company’s chickens are free to move about the barns and have access to the
outdoors. None are caged.
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| Ultimate Egg free range hens in the front paddock |
What I noticed first off is that the paddock out the front,
visible from the front driveway, is quite appealing with lots of grass, big
trees, little shade houses for the birds, and what appear to be lots of big,
brown, happy-looking chickens poking about, exploring the paddock, and behaving
like chickens (though I note their beaks had been clipped). As you walk down
the row of barns--there were five or six long shed/barns--the paddocks outside
the barns appeared less inviting with less grass and few trees, and fewer
chickens were seen out frolicking. Outside the farthest barn, half a dozen
chickens pecked aimlessly at the dirt outside the doorways in a mostly bare
paddock, while all the rest stayed crowded in the barn, hen-pecking and
hen-pecked. They could go out—the doors were open--but chose not to. I was
surprised that this was the barn they allowed us to look inside.
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| Ultimate Egg free range hens in the barn |
I was most heart-wrenched by a hen just on the other side of
the fence in that farthest paddock (one of the few outside) whose tail feathers
had all been plucked out leaving a bare-skin behind, and whose comb appeared to
have been virtually pecked off as well. She had made it outside, but to what?
Dirt and stones, a bit of grass farther away, and of course she would have to
go back inside the barn for food and water and to lay her requisite egg. It was
the saddest sight I saw all day. I just wanted to pick her up, give her a
cuddle, and bring her home.
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| Ultimate Eggs stacked on pallets |
The Ultimate Egg Company is a smaller operation than Turks,
but much is still automated: hundreds of eggs roll down conveyor belts from the
barns and are mechanically sorted and deposited on trays. An inspector looks
for cracks and breaks, then stacks the trays onto pallets which are lifted into
trucks with a fork-lift. The Ultimate Egg Company was in operation the day we
were there (obviously chickens don’t take a day off), and I don’t remember the
stats we were told about how many employees they have, or how many chickens, or
how many eggs are produced, and their website does not supply that information.
I seem to remember someone saying the chickens are kept for about two years
before they too end up as meat birds.
After these two chicken stops, I meandered on to several
other food producers (Woodhaven Gardens, Genoese Pesto, and Thoroughbread Foods
who make bread) before calling it a day. In short, I can say those were more
pleasant stops, but not the topic of this post.
I think it is brave of producers like Turks and the Ultimate
Egg Company to open their doors like this to the public. I don’t think it is
likely to generate new or more enthusiastic customers. It’s easy to be beguiled in the supermarket by
those “free range” labels where chickens and eggs are sold, and to assume that
those chickens have led reasonably pleasant lives before their deaths. Mostly,
I think they do not. I did not find either of these visits made me want to go
out and buy either chicken or eggs, or to eat them and support these industries.
What I missed most was some recognition that these chickens are sentient animals
with personalities and lives that matter, not just “products”. The egg
production process seemed as mechanical and product-oriented as the meat
factory. None of these chickens—and their numbers are vast—is allowed to have a
name, a personality, or the recognition of a being that matters as anything
other than as a mechanical (though breathing) egg producer, or carcass for
processing.
And so… While this appears to be a post about chickens and eggs, I
think it’s really more a post about who we are as human beings. Sobering. Many
things in this world make me sad.
