A source of nutritious, white meat has been besmirched by incorrect ideas about its production, writes Vincent Carton.
It's the most popular meat in Ireland - and the one most often rubbished in media. Whether it's a chef on The Late, Late Show or a "resident foodie" on a radio programme, the easiest way to fame and controversy is by claiming that chicken is full of hormones and antibiotics; it's produced in cruel, filthy conditions; and it'll poison you with salmonella. Every one of which is untrue.
The most ludicrous extreme example of this kind of misinformation came recently on a national radio programme, where a food "expert" opined that chickens were being grown too quickly. The implication being that chickens are in some way forced to skip their avian childhood and become adults too soon. The reality is that a chicken progresses to adulthood in the time required by its particular breed and nothing on God's Earth will speed it up or slow it down.
The myth of the chicken as a badly produced food to be ashamed of seems to be a confusion between battery hens producing for the egg market, and birds raised for the table. So people talk about cramped surroundings and birds unable to move, force-fed with antibiotics and living in cages.
None of that happens in reputable chicken production in Ireland.
Chickens live in great airy houses on farms, with plenty of room to move around. Indeed, in the houses on the farms which supply my family's company, the very mobility of the chickens gives us a measure of their health. Chickens like to jump up on higher surfaces and perch. So all chicken houses are equipped with weighing scales in several locations, inviting the birds to hop up, perch for a while and move off. The weighing scales immediately feed the weight of the birds into a computer, which gives us a daily indicator of their health. At the end of every day, we can tell just how healthy are the flocks in every house supplying our plant - this has important implications for Avian Influenza (AI).
Cruel? We're forensic in our detection of any possible cruelty or neglect. For example, every chicken arriving into our plant for processing is photographed after the kill and de-feathering. These photographs allow our computer to register any bone-break or bruise. If there's any issue of bad stockmanship, that farmer will not get a new batch of chickens until we're sure it has been rectified.
The nonsense about antibiotics harks back to the days when, in order to give an animal a balanced feed diet, pellets were first created from ground flour. The advantage of a pellet is that it gives a balanced diet to the animal, so you know, mouthful by mouthful, what the animal is eating.
However, birds were not designed to eat pellets. When a chicken takes a pellet into its gizzard - because it doesn't have a mouth with teeth - the pellet quickly becomes a soggy mixture, which passes far too quickly through the intestine. Because the gizzard hasn't had to work hard enough, it doesn't generate enough digestive juices. The small intestine, as a result, is insufficiently acidic, creating the perfect medium for a bacterium called "scour" to develop. Scour, to a human, would be diarrhoea.
The scientists came up with the answer: antibiotics. When antibiotic is included in the feed, the antibiotic kills the scour bacteria and the animal can continue to grow. That worked a treat. Until humans started getting ill, and doctors prescribed antibiotics to solve the problem and guess what, they didn't work. National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG) found out that 60 per cent of the most common salmonellas were immune to the most commonly used antibiotics. This is because, within 30 days, a bacterium will go through as many generations inside a chicken as mankind has since the caveman. The ones who mutate and are immune to the antibiotics are the ones that survive.
Because our feed mill only feeds our birds and no other animals, we were ideally situated to address this. It was our mill manager who invented the solution, which was to leave one-third of the grains coming through the mill unground. This results in a slightly bigger pellet with a substantial quota of whole grain in it. That whole grain gets into the gizzard and makes it work harder and so we don't need to use antibiotics in our feed.
The EU from 2005 banned antibiotics across the EU. Hormones are banned and always have been in the EU, whereas in other countries they're not. Any talk of hormones in Irish chicken is simply misinformed.
Similarly, as part of a recent EU-wide survey of salmonella, Irish chicken was tested. Although Cartons, as the largest producer, provided more than half the sample's tests, not one revealed the presence of salmonella enteriditis or salmonella typhimurium, the two forms of salmonella that caused 60 per cent of human salmonella infection in 2006.
The reality is that chicken processed in a modern plant in Ireland is the healthiest and most cost-effective option available. It's lower in fat than beef or pork because, in a bird, fat is stored on the outside of muscle and you can trim it off. A well-trimmed chicken fillet, for instance, will be less than 1 per cent fat.
Vincent Carton is managing director of Carton Group Ltd, producers of Manor Farm chickens