The £3 chicken: what is a fair price for a life?
OPINION: The price of chickens in supermarkets has been steadily declining to the point where life is worth just a few pounds. But can there ever be an appropriate price, and is there a problem with our regard for life as reflected in recent media coverage? Claire Hamlett discusses.
What is a fair price for a chicken? This was the question posed by a feature story in the Guardian recently. At an average price of £3, it’s now possible to buy a chicken in a supermarket for less than a third of what it cost 50 years ago. The article and its headline - The £3 chicken: how much should we actually be paying for the nation’s favourite meat? - highlight two problems with thinking about an appropriate price for what was once a living being.
One is the underlying assumption that there is a fair price. Of course, more expensive meat is supposed to ensure animals can be raised to higher welfare standards rather than simply being produced as efficiently as possible. But as long as the focus is on the conditions in which the chickens, or other animals, are farmed, paying for animals to be killed for food remains the unchallenged norm.
More than ever, this seems like a deeply contradictory assumption to hold. Animals, including chickens, were recognised in law as sentient beings mere months ago. Yet the implications of that are scarcely considered by anyone outside of the vegan community. We know these creatures can feel not just physical pain and suffering but mental anguish too. This should lead to a broader questioning in society not just about how they are treated while they’re alive - and how much we are willing to pay for it - but also whether it can ever be right to kill them when they have inner lives. The fact that this questioning has not happened shows the depths to which speciesism is entrenched - neither the Guardian nor any other newspaper would run a story asking how much would be reasonable to pay for dog or cat meat.
The second issue that the story raises is about how little value people give to chicken lives to start with. While there are a number of factors that affect the price of food, including costs elsewhere in the supply chain, labour and trade deals, as one farmer interviewed in the story points out, if consumers want cheap meat, the industry will provide it. Some people may be willing to pay more for chickens raised in better conditions, but by and large, people are all too comfortable with paying as little as possible for chicken meat. A particularly stark example of this is in events that encourage large numbers of people to eat fast food.
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Two weeks ago, restaurant chain YO! Sushi launched its Christmas menu by giving away 2,000 buckets of fried chicken around the UK over two days in November. Local news outlets reprinted YO! Sushi’s press release without stopping to question how the chicken was produced or why giving away so much of it for free was financially feasible. The promotion was to do with the popularity of eating KFC around Christmas in Japan - a “tradition” that started in the 1970s as a marketing ploy by the fast-food company, which had only recently opened its first restaurant there. Due to the success of the campaign, around 3.6 million Japanese families eat fried chicken together every December. “It filled a void,” professor of marketing Joonas Rokka explained to the BBC. “There was no tradition of Christmas in Japan, and so KFC came in and said, this is what you should do on Christmas.” That something so vacuous has resulted in the mass consumption of fast-growing chickens raised in poor conditions, and has spawned further marketing ploys without any pushback, is deeply troubling.
Of course, Japan is far from the only country that indulges en mass in eating cheap meat at certain times of the year. In the US, more than one billion chicken wings are consumed for the Super Bowl every year. The demand for wings creates a surplus of chicken meat, meaning other parts of the chicken get sold for a lower price. Such events highlight how far most people are from caring about the welfare let alone the deaths of chickens, as it simply isn’t possible to produce such large quantities of meat without causing harm to the animals. Those who participate in these sorts of excesses of cheap meat consumption either don’t know - or more likely don’t care - what the cost is to the other beings.
Journalists should continue to question the low cost of animal-based foods, but as long as articles on the topic take it as a given that a price can be put on animal lives, the implications of animal sentience and recognising it in law will remain unexamined by most of the public.
Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.
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