The recent programs about free-range chicken on Channel 4 have really got people going. Most are wholeheartedly behind Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s campaign to rid the supermarket shelves of intensively-reared poultry. But, like any new initiative, the free-range chicken movement has its detractors. Most appear to have fixed their arguments on an obvious target – the price. But is it possible that Chinese-whispers are coming into play and causing a bit of imagined inflation in the chicken market?

In Hugh’s program itself, a few locals were canvassed, and were critical of the price. The funny thing was that every time someone new was interviewed, they seemed to be adding £3-4 to the alleged price. It started at about £12 and ended up at something like £25! Which makes you wonder where the rumour could end up. ‘So, what are you going to do with your £1million lottery win, Mr Smith?’. ‘Well, I fancied a new Ferrari and the wife’s been after a new house for years, but we’ve decided to really push the boat out and buy ourselves a free-range chicken instead’.

Free-range chicken is more expensive. That’s because it’s more expensive to produce. But while it is perfectly possible to spend more on a chicken than most people can afford, not all free-range chicken will mean putting the new house on hold. Very often, you only need pay between 50p and £1 more per kilo for something that, in every way, is a far superior product. OK, so it might not have been taken on holiday to the Maldives and fed a diet of champagne truffles, but anything better than the intensive systems that Hugh highlighted must be better.

Find your nearest chicken producer on BigBarn and go and talk to them. Ask them what they do, tell them what you want, – even tell them what you can afford – and you might find yourself pleasantly surprised. The more we go direct, and stop the middleman having the conversation with producers on our behalf, the more we’re likely to get the products we want at a price we can afford.

Bad news for light-aircraft flyers; just when you thought it was safe to take to the skies without danger of paranormal activity occurring, it looks like you may need to think again. It was easy before – just make sure you’re not bouncing through the clouds anywhere off the coast of Bermuda, particularly when feeling in a slightly odd mood, and all should be tickety-boo. Well, not any more. Steer your trusty kite towards West Yorkshire on a pleasant Sunday in late January and you’re in danger of flying into the Rhubarb Triangle!

The Rhubarb Triangle is an area between Bradford, Leeds and Wakefield that has actually existed for many years, but unlike the Bermudan version (where far less rhubarb is grown, and far more things mysteriously disappear) few people have heard of it. It’s the home of forced rhubarb – rhubarb grown in dark, warm conditions to increase the length and sweetness of the stalks – which is in season at this time of year. In fact, a hundred or so years ago, 90% of the world’s crop of winter rhubarb was grown in the Rhubarb Triangle.

Forced rhubarb is more tender and delicately flavoured than its outdoor cousin, which is ready in the spring, but like the outdoor variety, it’s far too tart to be eaten raw. Stew it with plenty of sugar for the best results. In the dark, depressing days of late January, when we’re all supposed to be at our most miserable, a nice bit of rhubarb cheers up the season no end. Thankfully there’s no need to tempt fate by flying into the triangle to get it; the wonderful pink stems should be brightening up farmer’s markets and farm shops all over the country at the moment, and you can navigate your way to them by looking on BigBarn.

Thank you Radio 4 for featuring us in this week’s Food Programme on food shopping online. Our Localfoodshop is already the biggest online Speciality food marketplace so give it a try. In the long term our goal is to give everyone in the country a complete shopping basket of local foods in one delivery. We have built the technology, have the database of producers and already have some parts of the country receiving such a service.

We now need to discover the factors for successful local delivery schemes and spread the word to both producers and consumers to help other areas get a local food delivery. Teaming up the three great shops featured in the programme is just one method to achieve our goal, delivery from farm shops or even village shops working with local farmers can also work well.

Online sales and local delivery can allow local food producers and small village shops to take business from supermarket online websites and defend against the threat of a mini supermarket setting up in villages. Such shops regularly force the independents to close dramatically reducing local peoples choice of foods, food information and sucking money out of the local economy.

If you have a local delivery not listed in Localfoodshop please tell us, or if you would like your local farmers or shops to team up and deliver, tell them to call us for a shop in Localfoodshop.

To read more about the Food Programme or listen again, visit

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/foodprogramme.shtml

If like me you enjoyed the celebrity chef’s recent TV programmes giving us the facts on chicken production you may have been dismayed to read that Tesco told the press that standard chicken sales were up 7 percent.

I couldn’t believe my eyes and really thought I should give up BigBarn and stop trying to change the buying habits of a Lemming type British public.

I then noticed last night, on my monthly supermarket visit to stock up on cans and cleaning products, when passing the chicken shelves, that the top two shelves for Free Range were bare. SOLD OUT.

That’s how they did! If you don’t give people the chance to buy free range, sales will not rise and because people have chicken on their shopping list they will probably buy a standard bird. I was grinning from ear to ear for the next ten minutes.

If I am wrong please let me know, if not, could someone please tell Tesco to stop giving the press totally misleading information.

In support of Hugh and all his efforts with intensively-reared chickens I thought it only fair to do a recipe involving chicken. He has done such a service in bringing the horrors of factory farming into the public eye – quite how anyone can actually use the term farming when referring to this practice is beyond me – factory yes, farming no.

This production line of creatures is bizarre and cruel. Having watched all three episodes of the program the one point a lot of people seem to discuss is the question of affordability, which I actually do take issue with. There aren’t many people who can afford to eat select cuts from their butcher (ok, or supermarket) every day. Organic and free range meat is expensive, and so it should be. It should be a treat. We do not need to eat meat every day, and to say that you need to buy two for a fiver chickens to feed your children is rubbish. Personally I would rather eat a decent piece of meat once a week and live on vegetables the rest of the time, and I imagine most people with a good sense of taste would do the same. I know my friends involved in the food industry certainly would. The practice of eating so much meat so often is really only a recent thing and is just indicative of the throw away society we live in; so much can actually be done with just the chicken carcass. When I was young we would almost always have chicken in cream sauce the day after a roast. For £2.50 people can’t be bothered.

I am including a bit here that I wrote on my blog back in May which seems quite apt:

“We need to think about what we are purchasing. Ten quid for a chicken isn’t paying for your Sunday lunch. It’s paying for the well-being and welfare of that animal during it’s life. It’s paying for it’s food, it’s owner’s food, it’s field, it’s barn. This disassociation between consumer, producer and animal (or vegetable) leaves us in a situation where essentially it’s ok to buy battery farmed chickens. It’s alright to purchase intensively reared pork. It’s acceptable to buy beef from cows that have been slaughtered in a line, one after the other, in full view of the rest of the animals, on a conveyor belt.

Meat shouldn’t be affordable – it should be something we eat once in a while, a Sunday roast. It should be a feast, and a celebration – a prime example would be my cousin’s engagement party. 100 people attended, and together we shared a pig and a deer; the pig supplied by a friend of his, and the deer he shot himself. Everyone at the party shared in the animals, and it was a delight. It felt right, the way meat should be eaten. Who wants anaemic chicken breasts every night, from a chicken that lived with constant ammonia burns on it’s legs, caused from living in it’s own shit and urine?

I’m not one of these protester types; I don’t force my views on people (except you lot – sorry!). When I see people purchasing battery farmed produce in the supermarket I just want to go and ask them if they understand the true nature of the way their food was raised. It’s this disparity between animal and object that is the root of this problem. We should place value on what is valuable. Intensive farming should be banned entirely. If the majority of us can’t afford meat seven days a week, good. It would certainly make for some creative cooking.”

Back to giving you a reason to buy a free range chicken – a really cracking pot-roast recipe. This recipe is a celebration of chicken, simple, easy and a great crowd-pleaser. The day after you’ve done it, don’t forget to use the rest of the chicken; there’s really nothing better than cold roast chicken sarnies, crisp lettuce and loads of mayonnaise.

Pot-roast chicken with Pearl Barley

Ingredients

1 chicken
1/2 kg sausages
2 onions
a few stalks celery
a few sprigs of thyme, rosemary, sage
or whatever you have to hand
3 large potatoes
3 large carrots or quite a few small ones
1/2 litre vegetable or chicken stock
a glass of white wine
a handful of pearl barley

I haven’t worried too much about quantities for this recipe as to be honest they are adjustable. This will feed about 6 people, but feel free to up the quantity of sausages and veg to make it go further. You could, alternatively, leave out the bangers if you were only feeding a few, or add other vegetables such as parsnips, swedes, celeriac.

In a large casserole dish with a tight-fitting lid brown your sausages all over. You can do this quite quickly as they will cook in the oven. Dice the celery, onion, potatoes and carrots. Brown them off for a few minutes in the dish. While this is happening, preheat your oven to 180. Take everything out of the casserole, set aside and put your chicken in. Return the other ingredients, add the wine, stock and pearl barley, season, put the lid on and place the whole thing in the oven. Come back an hour and half later, test the chicken – if it needs longer, pop it back in for fifteen minutes and check again. It’s dead simple, and the joy of pot-roasting is ending up with a delicious, moist chicken and no faffing. It’s only a quarter past nine and I’m already starving! Don’t forget to buy organic or free-range sausages too. Don’t get me started on pigs…
© William Leigh

It’s a wonder that the Swedish Tourist Board hasn’t tried to enforce a change of name on the unfashionable swede. It’s not exactly the nicest-looking of vegetables and in today’s brand-obsessed world, you can’t help but wonder if they’d rather it was called a norway. In fact, elsewhere it does have different names. In America it’s known as the rutabaga, while Scots know it simply as ‘neeps’.

What the swede isn’t, is a turnip. Although the two are both a part of the cabbage family, the turnip tends to be a lot smaller and to have a whiter bottom half, where the swede is noticeably yellow.

However, despite its rather ugly appearance, swede is a delicious vegetable and a stalwart of the winter larder. It’s perfectly versatile (boil it, bake it, roast it) but there’s no finer way to serve it than as a buttery mash (treat as you would potatoes basically) with tatties (mashed potato) and haggis. The night for that is 25th January, which is Burn’s night, and as that’s on a Friday this year you’ve got the perfect excuse to wash January’s abstinence away with a few whiskies while you’re at it. Doesn’t matter if you’re not Scottish – we’re all friends on this small island of ours. Well, at least until the rugby starts.

Hugh’s Chicken Run, on Channel 4, has woken even more people up to what really goes into making their cheap chicken. The vast majority of people are shocked (if they didn’t know about it already), angry and disgusted at what the programs have revealed. There seems to be only one line of defence left in the fight against intensive poultry farming practices, which is that cheap chicken is all some people can afford. Let’s destroy that line of defence right now.

Cheap chicken is NOT all that some people can afford. Food used to account for 40% of our disposable income. Now, thanks to supermarket practices (of which intensive poultry farming is one outcome), food only accounts for 10% of disposable income. In other words, 30% is being spent on other things. Playstations, mobile phones, CDs, DVDs, you name it – all manner of things that are nowhere near as fundamentally important to our lives as food.

It’s about priorities, plain and simple. Anyone who has watched Hugh’s Chicken Run and still says they can’t afford to buy better chicken actually just doesn’t care enough to make a change.

For those that do, here’s what you can do right now:

1. Search on BigBarn to find your nearest proper chicken producer
2. Visit Localfoodshop to buy high-quality chicken
3. Register with BigBarn (http://www.bigbarn.co.uk/register) to stay informed about what’s going on in your area.
4. Visit http://www.chickenout.tv/ and add your name to the petition.

We’re 100% behind Hugh and his fantastic campaign. We hope you are too.

Happy Foody New Year. Another year has passed in our quest to
get more local food to local people. Our job is to help you get
better food and for those that want to, save money.

BigBarn is now seven years old and the leading local food
website, with over 7,500 icons on the BigBarn map and our new
LocalFoodShop for the new era of buying food on line.

Supermarkets have tried jumping on the local food wagon, some
falling off with a bump. Big stores can talk about stocking
local food but rarely provide the real story behind the
product. I saw, for instance, a photo of farming friend on a
pack of potatoes the other day but know the chances of them
being his spuds were one in ten. An example of a misleading
label decreasing the trust I have in today’s food industry.

I do however, still find myself in a supermarket occasionally
buying cleaning products or tins of tomatoes, and completely
understand why most consumers say they want local food but do
not buy it. Our mission is to help the transition from a one
stop shop to buying local, an easy, painless change.

I always advise people that the first step to buying local food
they can trust is to try their local meat and or veg supplier.
To shop there once a week, reducing the big shop to once a
fortnight, or month. I know, and I am sure many reading this
note will agree, that not only do you get better and fresher
produce this way, you also save money. Not just comparing
prices like for like, but also avoiding all those two for ones
in the supermarket that you don’t really need.

Step two is to ask your local suppliers what they have on offer
and ways to cook it. I, for instance, buy breast of lamb from my
local meat supplier for £1 and roll it with stuffing to feed at
least 3 people. Local veg in season can also be cheap and great
for making a big soup or adding to a casserole. Or register
with BigBarn so that local producers can tell you when they have a
special offer via our free emailed newsletter.

Step three is to have a good look at LocalFoodShop and take the
plunge to buying on line. So far LocalFoodShop includes over
230 producers and 4,500 products from around the UK, anything
from Potted Shrimps to Gobble, Oink and Zoom Coo Pie, from Rare
Breed Free Range Goose to Fresh Creel Caught Langoustine. This
year will see more producers joining the shop and adding special
offers and recipe ideas. And over time, see the shop provide
most people in the UK with a local alternative to the
supermarket, where a wide range of local produce can be ordered
and received in one delivery.

So a very happy and Good Food 2008 from us all at BigBarn and
please spread the word to your local food producers and friends.

Some interesting LocalFoodShop products:

Potted shrimps
Angelsey sea salt
Homemade pesto
Sourdough cultures
Organic bread making flour
Sussex beer mustard
Organic beef
Famous Bedfordshire Clangers
Smoked garlic
Wild black boar sausages
Rum-conditioned cider