The secret recipe to cheap chicken (supermarkets don’t want you to know about)

Name of recipe: Whole chicken, weighing a minimum of 1.35kg.

Tastes like: Not much. Little to no flavour due to fast-growth and weak bones with little flavoursome collagen and fat. Oh and watery breasts that slice like butter. You wouldn’t taste of much if you’d grown quickly in low light that left you a bit twitchy, unable to really stretch your legs or rest properly and where the constant opportunity to eat is your only solace.

Popularity: Huge, massive. Like really, really big. The biggest thing since sliced bread (don’t get us started…). Every day Britons consume 2.2 million chickens. Of the total of UK chicken production, free-range accounts for 5% and organic 1%.

When was it created? The recipe was born when rationing was lifted in 1954, prompting increased production of chickens raised for meat. The birds? They’re slaughtered at on average 31 days.

Who created it? Independent poultry trade disappeared during the Second World War. Turns out it was retailers, not the Ministry of Agriculture, who pressed British poultry farmers to follow American methods and exploit economies of scale and to drive down prices.

How much? on average, £3.15 per bird.

Serving suggestion: Add a dose of antibiotics to stave off E-coli. In 2016, 24% of UK supermarket chicken samples tested positive for the bug. Experts now estimate 50% of all antibiotics in the UK is given to farm animals.

Can ingredients be swapped? Throw me a slow-grown bone. Funny you mention… did you know slow-grown birds are reared over 81 days? That’s over double the supermarket average.

But how does it compare with free-range? Truly free-range birds walk around outside during the day, move their muscles more than those kept indoors in mega-sheds and enjoy a varied diet. Their ability to roam free, in addition to the age of slaughter, impacts the taste and texture of the meat. So with a slow-grown and free-range bird, you’re winning.

The result? Birds with thicker skin with a better fat content that’s full of flavour. Their meat is a lot firmer and has more structure because the birds actually use their legs to roam around and forage. Oh, and they have stronger bones too because they’ve developed properly — meaning it’s definitely worth whipping up a batch of stock.

Phew. I thought it was all doom and gloom for a second. Or am I missing something? There is another way. Every food purchase is a vote for the kind of food system you want. Buying sustainably produced chicken, knowing who produced it and also holding them accountable is a step in the right direction. Know your chicken farms and you won’t go far wrong.

Discover more on the real cost of cheap supermarket chicken.

Meet farmers Nick and Jacob at Fosse Meadows farm who rear slow-grown poultry in Leicestershire.

Britain’s most popular cheap chicken recipe, courtesy of supermarkets was originally published in Farmdrop on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

British farmers are being saved, thanks to you. By voting with your pound, you’re changing the lives of British farmers and the communities that surround them. Here’s the story of farmer Rowie Meers at Purton House Organics in Swindon — thanks to you, the impact on her life and livelihood has been extraordinary.

Rowie is living proof that the ‘back-to-the-land’ journey is a viable alternative to intensive methods that harm the environment and our health. The first farmer to sell directly to consumers via Farmdrop, in this film she shares the beauty of small-scale organic British farming and how her business has been turned around since working with the platform.

Rowie Meers on changing the system and saving British farmers

“Since working with Farmdrop, we’ve doubled our beef sales and quadrupled the amount of pork we produce (going from a pig a month, to a pig a week). We’re expanding our beef herd at the moment and have recently got a new chicken house so we can have another 300 birds too.

Farmdrop have helped me to have other outlets. Before, what we were selling in our farm shop really wasn’t enough to warrant having beef and pork consistently available every week. Now meat is a permanent fixture in my farm shop — this is all thanks to the fact that by now selling most of our produce via Farmdrop, we can stock our farm shop. The team handles the marketing which takes a huge hassle away from me, so I can concentrate on producing good food for our customers.

Working with Farmdrop has has saved me. The people here are really in tune with how we work and because you’ve looked after us we’ve turned around what was a loss into a profit for our business. We’re heading in the right direction.”

Discover more about Rowie’s farm and more real-life British farming stories, of places and people with faces. (Not fake farm names…)

Here’s how you’re saving British farmers was originally published in Farmdrop on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Starved of the latest delicious crop of food books? Whether you’re on a journey of self-food discovery, on the hunt for food waste hacks or fancy a dip into rural Britain’s diverse world of modern farming, here are six great books for food lovers to get you started.

Too Good to Waste: How to Eat Everything by Victoria Glass

There’s certainly no shortage of beautiful and innovative cookbooks, but Glass’ Too Good to Waste is doing something truly different. Addressing the amount of household food needlessly thrown away (Jamie Oliver has stated that 50% gets thrown away every week), its recipes all use ingredients that might otherwise end up in your bin. Brassica stems, wilting salad, soured milk and stale bread all feature, not as an afterthought, but as the hero in this collection of tempting and tasty recipes. Featuring alluring dishes such as ‘broad bean pod fritters’, Glass is informative and friendly, without ever feeling preachy.

One for you it you’re interested in: zero-waste cooking, sustainability, unusual recipes.

Land of Plenty: A Journey Through the Fields and Foods of Modern Britain by Charlie Pye-Smith

Interested in how your food gets to you in Britain? Then Land of Plenty is a must-read. On a mission to find the heart of British agriculture, writer and broadcaster Pye-Smith sets off in a Dormobile camper to visit farmers in virtually every corner of Britain. From beef farmers in the Scottish borders to soft fruit producers in Essex, he discovers the immense challenges farmers (aka the managers of our landscape) face today. Pye-Smith encounters a diverse range of enterprises — from long-term family farms and those new to the industry to large estates using robotics.

This accessible introduction to farming is a nuanced account of the countryside that is neither romantic or damming but refreshingly balanced. Its closing message is hard to forget, shining a light on our collective responsibility for the resilience of our farmers and security of our food: “Living in a land of plenty should be a reality, not just an aspiration, and we consumers have as much of a part to play as our farmers.”

One for you it you’re interested in: knowing how your food is made, meeting people, travelling the British isles.

Knife: The Cult, Craft and Culture of the Cook’s Knife by Tim Warner

Along with most things food-related, fascination with our kitchen knives has had something of a recent revolution. Slightly disturbingly referred to as ‘knife porn’, Instagram feeds are increasingly swarmed with beautiful photos of artisan knives. Knife is a fascinating study of this essential culinary tool and it’s affect on and relationship with food history. Hayward explores everything from the ‘anatomy of a knife’ to comparing Western and Japanese knives. Drawing on the social and cultural significances as well as his relationship with his own knife roll, his journey is both technical and incredibly personal. With beautiful (dare we say pornographic?) photographs of every knife under the sun, you’ll be researching your next knife purchase before you’ve even put the book down.

One for you it you’re interested in: socio-cultural history, slightly geeky non-fiction, excellent photography and, er…knives.

The Angry Chef: Bad Science and the Truth About Healthy Eating by Anthony Warner

Fed up of fad diets? This one’s is called The Angry Chef for a reason. Warner has it in every nutrition expert who claims “they can cure deadly disease with carrot juice and enemas”. Having studied biochemistry and worked in the food manufacturing industry, Warner’s anger at the rejection of mainstream science and proliferation of popular food myths set him off so much, he started a blog with the same name 2016. Still angry, his book demystifies and debunks food fads and the pseudoscience that goes with them, backed up with research, analysis and some cutting humour along the way.

One for you it you’re interested in: accessible food science, a researched view on healthy eating, a good ol’ rant.

The Running Hare: The Secret Life of Farmland by John Lewis-Stempel

“I have had a gut’s-ful of chemical farming”, says environmentalist Lewis-Stempel with a hint of anger at modern agriculture’s dismantling of ploughland in The Running Hare. This piece of nature writing tells the story of Britain’s disappearing wildlife as the author adopts his own take on traditional methods to restore its fertility and wildlife. A homage to the south Herefordshire countryside written in diary form and full of spontaneous prose, its political dimension leaves plenty of room for a colourful education as agricultural history mingles with childhood memories and rural legend.

One for you it you’re interested in: countryside idyll, prose-full food history, questioning modern agriculture.

The Gastronomical Me by MFK Fisher

Ever feel like to escaping to a world where guilt around what we should and shouldn’t eat doesn’t exist? MFK Fisher’s superb memoir is it. We follow Fisher around in mid-century America and Europe as she (gastronomically) comes of age, learning to eat, drink and most importantly live with unashamed gusto. Describing the food and people she encounters in exquisite prose, this is a book of joyous discovery, where the pleasures of dining alone, ordering well and finding nourishment along the way are liberating to author and reader alike. For a book to simply remind us of the joy of eating, this is a perfect and very attractive little package.

One for you it you’re interested in: travel, superb gastronomical memoirs, inimitable contemporary food writing.

6 books every food lover should read this summer was originally published in Farmdrop on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You might not be familiar with eating old hens, but your grandparents will (probably, if they grew up on or near a farm that is). So, what the cluck is a spent hen? Unfortunate name aside, a spent hen is a former commercial egg laying chicken. Modern commercial egg laying hens are bred to pop out around 300 eggs per a year. For some perspective on just how many that is, chicken’s wild ancestor, red junglefowl, lay around a dozen per year. When young, these hens (also known as pullets) start laying eggs at about 5 months old, but at 15 to 17 months their egg production slows down. At this point, because the bird hasn’t been bred specifically to be eaten, it will be taken to a slaughterhouse to await a potential destiny in pet food or be frozen and shipped abroad for folks to eat before being replaced with a younger hen.

Why don’t we eat spent hens?

Industrialised poultry farming has removed the need to eat spent hens today, however it seems crazy that these edible hens are removed from our food chain. Modern chicken production — for both meat and eggs — is big business. 94% of the 2.2 million chickens consumed in the UK daily come from intensively reared birds. Free-range accounts for just 5% and organic 1% and last year we ate 12.6 billion eggs, according to the British Egg Council.

Industrially farmed broiler chicken (raised specifically for its meat) are bred quickly to be as big as possible, with lots of easy-slicing white meat. Today consumers can pick one up in a supermarket for less than the price of a pint of beer. In 1950s Britain, chicken was a treat where most people ate less than a kilo over a year. A spent hen was likely to have made it to the dinner table of a British farmer or smallholder in a time of post-war rationing where nose-to-tail eating was a practical way to make the most of what you had. Now we eat more than 2kg of chicken a month, averaging 25kg in a year.

Spent hens may not be a common food in Britain, but you can spot them at markets in Thailand (complete with its unlaid eggs or reng khai, more on that later) or across West and South-West Africa in dishes such as muamba, the Angolan chicken stew. In France, the farmyard bird hit the pot in the shape of coq au vin, where its ‘coq’, aka the older male cock, is braised slowly in red wine (traditionally a Burgundy) to breakdown its tougher meat.

So, why don’t we eat more spent hens in Blighty? I may not be a smallholder or a farmer, but it seems sensible to think that if you eat meat reared for food, you should explore eating it all and not just shy away from the bits that don’t look so pretty or need to be treated differently. Flavour and texture has been bred out of chicken in favour of high yields and low prices as a result of industrial farming. If spent hens are being dished out in other countries, then quite frankly it feels like we’re missing out. But before the eating comes the cooking, along with my first learning that a spent hen needs a little special handling in the kitchen.

Spent, means older, meaning tougher, meaning low and slow

Cooking an older spent hen demands an acknowledgement for the life it had, but much more so than your regular chicken dinner. ‘You can’t just pop it on a tray and cook it in the oven for an hour or so like your Sunday roast’, our Meat Buyer Jaks tells me the evening before I’m due to cook it. He then informs me that my particular spent hen would’ve lived for around 600 days. That’s approximately 17 times longer than the 35 days of a typical supermarket chicken and 7.4 times longer than the 81 days of a slow-grown high welfare chicken. As one of the former organic free range egg laying hens at Purton House Organics, my spent hen would’ve spent much, much more time pecking, walking, scratching around outside, nesting, and of course, laying eggs.

How to cook a spent hen

‘You need to cook it slowly at a really low temperature. Try it in a big pot of liquid, for at least 6 hours.’ Jaks advised. Because this spent hen has moved around a lot more in its natural environment of grass and woodland, it needs long, slow cooking at a low temperature ‘like lamb shoulder or beef shin would’. And so the next day armed with this newfound knowledge, off I went. I browned the bird first before bringing it to a boil in a large pot of water with an onion and a stick of celery and left it to simmer for 6 hours.

Tasting an organic free range spent hen vs. a high welfare free range chicken

I wanted to compare the birds by cooking them in ways that suited the different ways they’d been reared. By no means an exhaustive experiment — more a dabble into a long lost food — here are a few intriguing things I found when comparing a spent hen slow cooked in water and a roasted high welfare free range chicken roasted in a little olive oil.

Flavour

Similar to turkey, but with a gamier flavour and very different taste to the buttery free range chicken beside it. Oddly, it tasted a bit like a chicken flavouring, or the essence of a chicken flavour — as if the taste of a slowly braised spent hen is the synthesized chicken flavour food scientists have been aiming for all this time.

Texture

The life the bird led was very much in apparent in the fabric of its flesh. At just over a kilo, the spent hen was skinny with small breasts, long lean legs and hardly any fat visible under the skin.

The white meat of its breast broke up into long strands when pulled apart, whereas the free range bird’s breast sliced easily, and still held its own. When I pulled the spent hen out of the pot the red meat was falling off the bone and tasted just like the usually ignored and massively underrated underside of a turkey. Sadly, both its white and red meat were pretty dry, which could possibly be explained by its very lean frame.

Shape

The picture above says it all, it’s a completely different shape to free range chicken. The legs of the 1.1kg spent hen measured 12cm, compared to the 8cm of the 1.8kg free range chicken. The older, lighter hen had bigger legs to support its smaller breasts, compared with short legs of the bigger broiler bird. Admittedly, the breeds of egg laying hens differ to chickens raised for meat. Globally, just two companies own the breeds that all commercial laying hens originate from — Hendrix and Lohmann. Between them they offer around 15 different breeds. My spent hen would’ve been either an Lohmann Brown, a Bovans Brown or an Amber Link hen.

Oh, and then there’s unlaid eggs

Premature. Embryonic. Immature. Unhatched. These are some of the names to describe the ‘in-utero’ unlaid eggs of a slaughtered chicken that are yet to develop a shell. These also accompanied my spent hen. Stay with me here and try not to get freaked out…

Eloquently described in a passage by an intrepid food blogger as ‘hard amber blooms about the size of a yolk, in rows like an organic assembly line on their way through the oviduct. Or they might be tiny yellowish seeds, like yolk buds on a stem’, unlaid eggs are a delicacy in many cultures and for pioneering chefs (enter Dan Barber) alike. Not to be confused with balut — fertilised duck eggs eaten straight from the shell and served up from street food stalls in the Philippines — unlaid hen eggs come in many guises. Creamy and flavourful, unlaid eggs are sometimes called the Yiddish eyerlekh, meaning ‘little eggs’, and are typically added to chicken soup. In Japan they’re called kinkan and in Thailand reng khai.

Unlaid egg mayonnaise anyone?

In an effort to sample this delicacy and make the most of all of the spent hen before me, I made a fairly cack-handed attempt to whip up an ‘unlaid egg mayonnaise’. My aim was to whisk them with a little mustard and a pinch of salt and gradually add a mix of rapeseed and olive oils to make an emulsion — the traditional mayo method. These golden globules however had other ideas and their outer membrane defied the whisk. So…they had to be cut open to release their runny yolk-like insides. Are you still with me?

After what looked like the beginnings of a cracking mayo, I accidentally added too much oil and my dreams of unlaid egg mayo were instantly dashed. I should’ve been patient. I should’ve known better. I should’ve got someone else to make it (thanks chef Alice for your whisking help). Or perhaps I should’ve simply added them to a soup, Yiddish style, or popped them in a carbonara.

Would I eat a spent hen again?

Yes, I would. But I’m not sure the way I cooked it did it any favours. It would be interesting to try it slow cooked in fat, confit style, as fat is definitely what’s missing and would help its texture and flavour along. Or trying it steamed for several hours before deep frying spiced batter might be a way to go as deliciously demonstrated by Zoe Adjonyoh (the chef behind Pop Brixton’s Ghana Kitchen) on Jamie and Jimmy’s Friday Night Feast.

Having visited the organic farm the spent hen came from I know it would’ve had a very happy and healthy life as an egg layer. Yet I can’t help but think the very mature age of this particular 600+ days-old bird will have impacted its taste and texture — more so than a ‘recently’ spent hen.

I also can’t shake the thought of food waste. On its Twitter feed, RSPCA Assured stated how ‘In some parts of Asia they don’t differentiate between meat and egg laying chickens. Instead, they use the same bird for both eggs and meat — a far less wasteful approach than we have adopted in the west’.

The bulk of the UK’s spent hens are frozen and shipped abroad or used for pet food and there currently isn’t much of a market for farmers to sell their spent hens for meat. In the case of the organic free range farm — who usually sell spent hens to the locals after their egg laying time is up — this is because ‘it costs £2 to buy a laying hen and £2 to slaughter it, so they’d have to sell it for at least £6 to be worthwhile’ explains Jaks. Yet after seeing Zoe whip up free range spent hen fried chicken to a welcome reception of happy Southend punters, I feel there’s life in the old birds yet.

What happened when I ate a spent hen was originally published in Farmdrop on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The average price of a UK chicken is cheaper than the average price of a pint of beer.

Here’s the price supermarkets don’t want you to know about:

• 91% of chickens sold in the UK are allowed by law to have an A4 sheet sized allowance of space in a shed.
• Chickens are kept in constant dim light day and night to discourage rest and speed up growth.
• Antibiotic use is routine resulting in 1/4 of chickens testing positive for antibiotic resistant e-coli.
• 2.2m chickens consumed daily in the UK. Around a billion chickens are slaughtered every year.

The supermarket Tesco selling a whole fresh chicken for £3.00

Every day in Britain we eat 2.2 million chickens. Poultry accounts for half the meat eaten in the UK — but how is it possible to sell a whole bird at such an extraordinarily low price? Industrial farming has made it possible for a bird to be housed, fed, slaughtered, processed, packaged and transported to a supermarket shelf near you, all for a price lower than an afterwork beer.

Here’s how factory farming has transformed the humble chicken we eat into something so unrecognisable, we may as well give it a new name.

Supermarkets enable a system where:

A whole fresh chicken is cheaper than a pint of beer.

The average price of a pint in the UK is £3.47. The average cost of a whole chicken weighing a minimum of 1.35kg from four of the leading supermarkets is £3.15. Chicken is a live animal, whereas beer isn’t.

The supermarket has made the whole chicken an everyday staple, such as bread or milk. In the race to the bottom, retailers will do anything to compete against price and keep them low for their customers, particularly for core staple products. If that means paying producers less (remember the nation’s dairy farmers ‘milk trolley challenge’ protest?), producing products of questionable quality or even using fake farm names to suggest provenance, then so be it.

Intensively reared chicken destined for the supermarket

94% of chicken in the UK comes from intensively reared birds.

Intensive methods mean UK chicken farms are allowed to house up to 39 kilos per square metre — that’s about 17 birds per square metre. Probably not what you consider when picking up a bird for the Sunday roast. “Intensive chicken farming goes on behind closed doors,” says Dil Peeling, campaigns director at charity Compassion in World Farming (CWF). “It’s hidden from people. They still have this image of chickens scratching around in a farmyard.”

It’s easy to assume that for every intensively produced chicken there are plenty of free-range and organic birds in the market. However, free-range accounts for just 5% and organic 1% of UK chicken production.

Any wizened farmer will tell you that you get out of the land what you put into it. The same goes for the varied range of chicken farming practices, reflected in the price you pay. You can expect to pay around £9.50 for a free range chicken and £12.80 for an organic one. These chickens differ dramatically in price to intensively reared birds due to how they are raised, and what they are fed.

A factory farmed chicken is raised in a warehouse and fed on grain grown elsewhere using environmentally damaging production methods. A slow-grown or organic chicken on the other hand will spend most of its life outdoors. For feed, it’ll rely on a mix of pasture, grain and hedgerow treats such as berries and seeds.

24% of UK supermarket chicken samples tested positive for antibiotic resistant E-coli.

The intense crowding of chickens in factory farming increases the likelihood of sickness and infection, thereby precipitating the use of preventive antibiotics. It’s estimated 50% of all antibiotics in the UK is given to farm animals. Experts predict that globally, 10 million people a year could die from antibiotic resistant infections by 2050. The world is waking up to the dangers of drug resistance as a result of the overuse of antibiotics and recognising a need for improvements in animal stewardship. Is time ticking for industrial chicken farming?

In 2016 researchers found superbugs on the shelves of all seven major UK supermarkets. Cambridge University Professor Mark Holmes told The Guardian newspaper: “The levels of resistant E. coli that we have found are worrying. Every time someone falls ill, instead of just getting a food poisoning bug, they might also be getting a bug that is antibiotic resistant”.

Slow-grown chicken farmers Nick & Jacob at their farm, Fosse Meadows. A world away from the average supermarket bird.

But there is an alternative:

A better tasting bird has a better quality of life.

Watery breasts that like slice butter, weak bones that bear no resistance, and meat with little, if no flavour. These sacrifices to taste, quality and flavour are a direct result of intensive farming. Chickens reared before World War II were primarily laying hens for egg production. Rationing was lifted in 1954, prompting increased production of chickens raised for meat.

Professor Andrew C. Goodley describes in his report ‘The chicken, the factory farm and the supermarket’ how the independent poultry trade ‘disappeared’ during the war and “it was retailers, not the Ministry of Agriculture, who pressed British poultry farmers to follow American methods, exploit economies of scale and so drive down the price of chicken.”

Farmers are embracing slow-grown chicken.

Small-scale poultry farmers Nick and Jacob at Fosse Meadows Farm in Leicestershire are doing things differently. They believe the best quality chicken comes from slow-grown birds and sell direct to customers across London at farmers’ markets and online via Farmdrop. Their birds are grown for at least 81 days. Nearly double the average slaughter age of 42 days in the EU. Author of The Ethical Carnivore Louise Gray notes how “industry ‘leaders’ are growing ‘fully grown’ chickens in 35 days…raised so fast they barely have time to move around, let alone develop fat, are tasteless.”

Fosse Meadows follow the slow-grown French Label Rouge way of farming which is highly regarded as an exemplary traditional method of raising poultry. “Our birds roam further and they don’t just sit and eat all day. Your supermarket free range chickens won’t be doing these things because their legs aren’t strong enough” says Nick.

The ability to roam free also impacts the taste and texture of the meat. Fosse’s birds moves their muscles more than those kept indoors and enjoy a more varied diet. “Our birds have thicker skin and a much better fat content with lots of flavour in that fat” Nick explains. “Their bones have developed properly and are much stronger. The meat is a lot firmer too and has more structure. It is totally different.”

Can chicken be made good again?

Every food purchase you make is a vote for the kind of food system you want. Buying sustainably produced chicken, knowing who produced it and also holding them accountable is a step to a better system.

Author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma Michael Pollan wrote, “eating industrial meat takes an almost heroic act of not knowing, or, now forgetting.” We haven’t forgotten. More consumers prove they care about these issues — by proving it with their pound. Big retailers will be forced to make changes that are better for our health, and our chickens.

How supermarkets have ruined chicken was originally published in Farmdrop on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A guest post from Patrick Holden, Dairy Farmer and Founding Director of the Sustainable Food Trust (SFT).

The younger generation are positively redefining the way we see ourselves in relation to the food and the environment.

I grew up in the late 1960s and so I consider myself a bit of a hippy. That decade marked a fundamental mind-set shift in the way people saw themselves in relation to the world. At the time, it was difficult to pinpoint where these ideas came from; many of them simply seemed to come through intuition.

I mention this because, for the first time since the late 1960s, I feel like another shift in consciousness is occurring among the younger generation, particularly amongst so called ‘millennials’.

There is a new field of scientific study called epigenetics which shows that all living organisms constantly interact with their external environment and that these influences can prompt changes in gene expression which can be passed down through the generations. Plants, for example, have epigenetic responses to the environment they grow in, as a result of which a plant may have a subtle difference in its genotype from its parents. Even more interestingly, certain epigenetic traits can stay dormant for several generations, only to find full expression at a later time.

So I suspect that the changing shift in consciousness towards food production and sustainability may actually be partly epigenetic. Perhaps the radical energy of the 1960s is now finding expression among millennials, albeit in a slightly different way.

For these reasons, as an organic farmer of almost 45 years, I have never been more optimistic about the future of farming. However, I am growing increasingly concerned about the large number of people turning to diets that may not necessarily be either healthy or sustainable.

If we are to move to a genuinely sustainable food system, then I think we all need to become much better informed about the sustainability or otherwise of different food systems. Only then we will be better placed to challenge the huge amounts of misinformation on so-called sustainable diets which are encouraging people to avoid all meats and animal products, despite the reality that in many (if not most climates and regions) it is difficult to farm in a truly sustainable way without livestock.

What is the problem with food and farming?

It has become a cliché but it’s true: supermarket food is not cheap and comes at a heavy price. The industrial application of nitrogen fertiliser has contaminated our water systems and atmosphere with dangerous nitrates; the subsidised production of fructose corn syrup has driven an increase in obesity and diabetes; and the excessive use of antibiotics in animals has caused a resistance to these drugs amongst humans.

The real problem is that none of the costs of all this damage is charged to the people who use it and, on the other hand, the positive effects of sustainable farming are not supported.

The current policy framework supports a dishonest economic food pricing system, as a result of which, the best business case is for farmers to grow using industrial methods and for retailers to buy the commodity products from industrial farms, process the hell out of them, package them so the consumer knows nothing about their backstory and then make a profit by turning that around.

So we need new incentives and disincentives, which ensure that the polluter pays and those who farm in a truly sustainable way are better rewarded for the benefits they deliver.

But what are the most sustainable farming methods?

There is no doubt that agriculture and farming is one of the most significant contributors towards climate change. Cutting back on the biggest pollutant (man-made fossil fuels) is very important but to actually reverse climate change — take CO2 out of the atmosphere — then we need to change the way we farm, particularly in relation to the way we look after the soil.

This is because organic matter in the soil is a store of carbon, thereby mitigating harmful emissions in the atmosphere. Britain’s soils store around 10 billion tonnes of carbon, which is more than total annual global emissions of carbon dioxide. Moreover, high levels of organic matter are also the basis for soil fertility, releasing nutrients for healthy plant growth and ultimately food. In other words, the amount of organic matter present in the soil is essential, both for combating climate change and ultimately improving our health.

The problem is that industrial farming methods have depleted organic matter in the soils. In the East of England, around 84% of the land’s carbon rich soil has been lost and continues to disappear at a rate of 1 to 2cm per year. That represents an enormous amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere.

Sustainable food systems are therefore about much more than simply avoiding nasty chemicals and antibiotics, they are about building organic matter in the soil through crop rotation and mixed farming practices.

It is possible for farmers to reduce the emissions from agriculture by re-introducing rotations in the way they use their land — introducing a grass and clover phase that builds soil organic matter, which is then grazed by ruminant animals on rotation, who fertilise the soil further, and results in an ability to grow healthy crops.

According to the International Panel on Climate Change, it is estimated that 89% of all agricultural emissions can be mitigated by improving carbon levels in the soil.

How can you eat in the most sustainable and healthy way?

Everyone, at least in principle, wants to eat a healthy and sustainable diet, but we are all very confused about how to do it. If you asked 10 people what the most sustainable and healthy way to eat was then you would probably get 10 different answers. A few might say vegetarian or vegan (the numbers eating a vegan diet has increased by 360% in the last decade) but I think that a large scale switch towards vegetarianism may not necessarily be compatible with sustainability.

In my opinion, many people have been led astray by bad science. The tools used by scientific researchers in the past, and whose published papers have prompted changes in people’s diets, were not based on sound science. It was said that red meat and animal fats should be avoided, both because they are unhealthy and because ruminant animals (cows and sheep) are largely responsible for harmful methane emissions.

But it turns out that neither of those positions are necessarily true.

The study that prompted Governments in Britain and the United States to recommend people to reduce their intake of fats was not based on solid evidence. It is this study that encouraged the food industry to replace fats with added sugars, and we are only now understanding the damage these do to our health.

And the studies that recommended a reduction in red meat consumption on grounds of reducing its environmental impact only look at certain factors in isolation rather than the whole food system. Land-use is often considered as bad in all instances, even though raising livestock is sometimes the only productive land use option available. Roughly two thirds of the UK’s agricultural land area is grass and the only way we can turn that into a good soil that stores carbon and grows healthy crops is to have ruminant animals grazing on a rotation system to fertilise the ground.

These flawed assumptions have had significant consequences for the way people eat. Beef production has halved since the 1980s and the consumption of lamb, arguably the most sustainable grass-fed meat for the land, has plummeted. While new evidence is now showing that animals fats are good for our health and cattle grazed in the right way can actually reduce carbon emissions by creating fertile soils.

Where do we go from here?

My message is simple: a healthy diet should work backwards from the most sustainable way to farm, and that ideally means eating the foods produced by mixed farms using crop rotations which include a fertility building phase, usually of grass and clover grazed by cows and sheep, but also pastured pigs and poultry.

Industrial farming has been an extractive industry. We have dined out on the natural capital of the soil that previous generations have laid down for us. We need to fix that because the environment in which a plant or animal is produced goes a long way to determine its nutrient value when consumed by humans.

About the Author

Patrick was founding Chairman of British Organic Farmers in 1982, before he joined the Soil Association where he helped lead the development of modern organic standards. He is now Chief Executive of the Sustainable Food Trust, which works to accelerate the transition to more sustainable food and farming systems.

Is eating no meat actually doing more harm than good? was originally published in Farmdrop on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What our latest investment means for the future of Farmdrop

This week, we announced a new £7m funding round. This is a really important and exciting milestone in the company’s history so I wanted to take the time to explain what this means for everyone connected with Farmdrop.

The first thing to say is that there is no “fast money” motive at Farmdrop. This is very important to the whole team here.

In the real world, every company needs to make money otherwise it will quickly disappear. But it should never be forgotten that it is the supermarkets’ obsession with profit that has done so much damage to our food system. Cheap food has been pursued at the expense of pretty much everything else — the environment, our personal health, and farmers’ livelihoods.

At Farmdrop we are extremely fortunate to have received this latest investment from people who truly believe in our mission. They are firmly committed to the big sustainability challenges that we are taking on and that means we can continue to focus on our core principles:

• Empowering more incredible local producers, giving them direct market access to customers so they can continue to produce food in a way that looks after the animals and conserves the land.
• Building a supply chain that doesn’t ruin the environment, providing a ‘produced on demand’ system that eliminates food waste, deliveries made in electric vans to keep the air clean, and packaging taken away so that it can be used again and again.
• And most importantly for our customers, continuing to deliver fresher, healthier, and more delicious food with brilliant service, made as convenient as possible.

Improvements to the platform

Now we have the investment there are a few changes we want to make that will improve the experience both for customers and farmers.

For you our customers, we are going to make it easier than ever for you to shop with Farmdrop, introducing a new regular order function if you want to use it, and also give you unrivalled information on the provenance of the food you are buying.

For our producers we are going to create a new digital platform that makes it easier to promote your food and manage your stock. This will include the introduction of a live digital chalkboard as a way of selling to customers.

As a business, we are going to carry on improving the efficiency of our logistical operation. It is only by moving food at the lowest cost that we can give producers a higher share of the final retail price, the best wage rates for our delivery teams, and the freshest food for customers.

Finally, as we move to other cities outside of London, our platform will only grow in a way that fosters and protects the original mission. We will always work first with local independent producers using farming methods that look after the planet and who grow foods to maximise flavour and nutrition.

Thank you!

Four years ago, a handful of us started out with an idea to create a more sustainable and healthy food system. Farmdrop is by no means the finished article and we still know we have a very long way to go but with this latest investment we can take the whole thing to the next level.

I want to say a big thank you to our farmers, the early investors, the amazing Farmdrop team we’ve assembled, and you our customers. You can only take on a challenge like this when you are surrounded by people who are equally passionate and committed to building a sustainable food system and in that respect I have been very fortunate.

One step closer to a more sustainable food system was originally published in Farmdrop on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Think you’re not naturally green-fingered? Think again. Where time, space and experience might seem like the backbone of a bounteous Victorian walled garden, for a cracking modern kitchen garden, all it takes are some low-maintenance crops and a few containers to get you channeling your inner Monty Don in no time.

Growing your own can mean much more than the convenience of the freshest fruit, vegetables and herbs at your fingertips. After seeing your first misshapen strawberry find its way into the world, you’ll find that growing your own ingredients will not only have a huge influence on how you cook, but you’ll be hit with a newfound appreciation of our humble fruit and veg. That little strawberry won’t be relegated to the bin — it’ll take pride of place atop your morning yoghurt. This is real food, to be celebrated, shared and devoured with joy. What are you waiting for? Start sowing and planting today!

What you’ll need:

Any small outdoor space will work, such a little balcony, wide doorstep or tiny patio. If none of those are available then a sunny windowsill indoors will do the trick for growing chives.

Tips before you start:

• To make things easy, start your kitchen garden with seedlings — the young plants already started for you available from local garden centres, found in the ‘grow your own’ section.
• Line your plant container with broken bits of pot or a layer of gravel to assist with drainage. Fill with potting compost.
• Water your seedlings both before and after planting. You can do this with a small watering can.

Chives

To grow

When to sow seeds: March to June

Where: In a small pot or window box in a sunny spot. If growing indoors, open the window now and again.

How: Lightly sow the seeds across the top of the compost and cover with a thin layer of soil. Water it a little, regularly. See, easy peasy.

Harvest: You’ll see results in 2 months. When you cut them to eat, leave 5 cm so they grow back.

To cook

Chives’ beautiful busy mauve-lilac flowers are edible too. Sprinkle over a salad or throw into an omelette or quiche along with its oniony green stalks, chopped finely. Preserve them in a pink-hued vinegar by half filling a sterilised jar with the flowers and topping with white wine vinegar. Leave in a dark place for up to 2 weeks, strain and add to dressings. Or try lightly battered in a chive flower tempura.

Spinach

To grow

When to plant seedlings: April to early May

Where: In a long large planter in a sunny shaded spot.

How: Plant 25 cm apart and water. Water well in dry weather.

Harvest: Ready to pick in about 12 weeks. Cut from the outside of the plant and by picking often, plenty of new leaves will be produced.

To cook

Add adding to pasta or risotto dishes. It’s excellent in a veggie butternut squash pie, a savoury take on pancakes or stuffed in roasted peppers with wild rice.

Rainbow Chard

To grow

When to plant seedlings: March to July

Where: In a large pot or planter in a sunny spot with some shelter.

How: Allow at least 30cm of space between seedlings. When it’s hot make sure to water them regularly so they don’t dry out. Luckily, this requires little attention to ensure a good crop.

Harvest: The leaves are the best with they’re small and tender. Harvest them when they’re about 15cm tall (about 8 to 10 weeks) and cut outside leaves first, leaving a few centimetres at the bottom.

To cook

Lightly braise with garlic and lemon and try served with roasted meats or stewed beans. You can use it in place of spinach — it’ll work a treat in eggs florentine or in a cheesy filo pastry pie.

Strawberries

To grow

When to plant seedlings: April to May

Where: Try using a wooden wine box with holes drilled in the bottom or upturned old light fixture with a large glass or plastic shade as a planter and positioning it on a sunny spot.

How: Plant seedlings 30 cm apart and give them tomato feed every 10 days once flowering. Keep well watered.

Harvest: As soon as the berries turn red (about 4–6 weeks), you’ll want to pick them straight away.

To cook

If you can hold out from eating them straight off the plant, pop the little beauties on top of granola with yoghurt or enjoy in a mini strawberry pavlova with teeny rounds of meringue topped with a dollop of lightly whipped cream and a single strawberry.

Beetroot

To grow

When to plant seedlings: May to July

Where: In a large and shallow planter or container in a sunny spot, with or without partial shade. It’s one of the most tolerant of veg.

How: Plant 10cm apart. They don’t like saturated soil so rainfall should do. If there’s a heatwave, water every 1 to 2 weeks.

Harvest: After 2 months. For the sweetest beets, harvest when their heads are slightly larger than a golf ball.

To cook

Earthy in taste and delightful in colour, chioggia or candy stripe beets are beautiful sliced and eaten raw in a salad, or try any variety salt-baked whole for a tender, flavour-packed beetroot dish. Use the leaves in the same way you would spinach (or your homegrown chard).

Do you have any green-fingered tips to help newbie gardeners? Share your tips and tricks in the comments below!

5 easy to grow fruit and vegetables in pots for the first time gardener was originally published in Farmdrop on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Making a brew with the V60

The V60 was created a decade ago by a Japanese company called Hario who specialise in heat resistant glass. It’s called the V60 because the cone is slanted at a 60 degree angle. You can pick up a V60 as little as £5 and it should come with a 16g coffee spoon.

Step 1: clean your paper and heat your vessel

Boil your kettle and pour hot water over the filter paper without the coffee grains, and allow the water to fall into your cup below. This process removes any residue paper particles from the paper which can spoil your coffee and also heats up your cup in anticipation for the coffee. Once this process is complete your water should be around the perfect temperature — somewhere between 80 and 93 degrees. What you don’t want to do is pour boiling water straight onto your coffee because it will burn it. Your tastebuds won’t reward you for it either, as they only work at milder temperatures, which is why ice cream has so much sugar in it to create flavour.

Step 2: put your coffee in

How much coffee you put in is dependent on personal taste. As a general rule of thumb, for every 250 ml of water you should use anywhere between 15 to 20 grams of coffee. These ratios are set by speciality coffee associations and are designed to give you the most flavourful cup. The spoon provided by Hario is 16 grams, so you can use one scoop of coffee per cup.

Step 3: the bloom period

Make sure you throw away the hot water in your cup that you used to clean the paper. Pour about 20% of the total water you want to use on the coffee grounds to allow the CO2 to escape from the coffee and to create a nice flat bed that ensures an even extraction. Leave it for 30 seconds.

According to Patrick at Pact, this stage of the process, otherwise known as the bloom period, is often neglected but crucial for making a good cup because it releases the CO2 that is built up in coffee after it has been roasted.

Step 4: extract the coffee

Pour your hot water in concentric circles, making sure that any coffee that rises to the top gets a good dousing of water. The more water you put on top, the heavier and slower the extraction process, so aim for having around 1 cm of water above the coffee grinds.

Avoid pouring straight into the middle or pouring around the edge of paper because it will limit the amount of contact time your water has with the coffee. Once finished, you will want to see a flat bed of coffee across the top to show that you’ve made a levelled extraction.

The extraction process should take around 3 minutes.

Making a brew with the Aeropress

The Aeropress was invented by Alan Adler, the same guy who made the Aeropie frisbee. Alan was frustrated that he couldn’t make an espresso at home without buying a very expensive coffee machine. And while it was originally used for making espressos at home, coffee-heads quickly found that it was the most consistent way to make a coffee. This is because the Aeropress involves a ‘total immersion technique’: all the coffee touches all the water, at the same temperature, and for the same amount of time.

Step 1: setting up (using inverse method)

This Aeropress guide uses the inverse method which is what allows for full immersion.

Place your paper in the plastic filter in the top of your cup and just like with the V60 wash the paper of any residual paper bits. Washing will also let the paper stick to the head so when you flip it later it won’t fall out.

Step 2: put your coffee in and heat your vessel

Fill up your Aeropress scoop with your coffee grinds and make sure that when you put it into the Aeropress that you avoid getting it into the hinges of the cylinder as this will stop you from adding the plastic filter.

Step 3 — the bloom period

Once your water is at the desired temperature, pour up to half way (measurement of 2 on the cylinder) and allow the coffee to bloom. Give it a stir by turning the aeropress scoop upside down — Patrick says it’s better than the stirer provided by Aeropress and helps to minimise washing up!

Step 4 — add the rest of the water

You want the Aeropress to brew for a total of 1.5 minutes, so after blooming for 30 seconds add the remaining water and allow to brew for a further minute.

Once your brewing time is up, close the seal with your plastic filter, flip it over and then apply as much pressure as you want. Again people have different techniques (slow, hard and/or fast) but Patrick goes for the simple method of ‘plunging as hard as you can’.

After you’ve extracted the coffee, turn the Aeropress upside down, remove the filter and then slide down the plunger to make it easier for you to put the waste coffee in the bin.

The V60 vs the Aeropress

As you can see from the photos there is a huge difference in colour and translucency between the two brewing methods. The V60 is less cloudy because there is less opportunity for the grounds to seep into your cup. The Aeropress by contrast involves a lot more applied pressure and the gaps in the side of filter can allow more coffee particles to escape into your cup.

Whether you want to use the V60 or the Aeropress is down to personal taste. The V60 makes more coffee but you have less control of the brew time and heat can escape out of the top. The Aeropress allows you to control all the different factors involved in the brewing time in a more precise way.

Patrick says you can also play around with lots of the variables to create different flavours and recommends using different recipes to get your perfect cup. For the best Aeropress recipes visit Nordic Coffee Culture and for the best V60 recipes visit Prima Coffee.

Learn more with Pact Coffee’s handy brew guides and add a pack to your weekly ethical grocery shop at www.farmdrop.com

What’s your favourite brewing method? Have any tips and tricks we’ve missed? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

How to make the best cup of coffee was originally published in Farmdrop on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Philip Lymbery is the author ‘Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were’ — this book takes you on tour of some of the world’s most iconic and endangered species, and what we can do to save them.

Food is a wonderful thing. It connects us, helps us express ourselves, defines and differentiates our cultures. The choices that we make at mealtimes, however, can have an immense impact beyond that which affects our daily lives.

When you think of penguins, jaguars and elephants, it’s probably unlikely that you think of the cheap meat piled up on our supermarket shelves. But there is a connection, and it is deeply worrying.

Intensive palm plantations are causing deforestation on a massive scale in Sumatra. They are destroying the last of the critically-endangered Sumatran elephant’s habitat. Large quantities of palm kernel, the edible nut from the trees, is being shipped out to feed intensively farmed cattle and other farm animals in the EU. There are now only 2,500 Sumatran elephants left in the wild.

In Brazil, the ever-expanding soya monocultures are destroying the once rich and varied rainforests. For the jaguar, there is little left. They have been squeezed out of their homes, and the ranchers see them as pests, often shooting them on sight. There now remain only 15,000 jaguars in the wild, half of them in Brazil.

Whether it’s the African Penguin in South Africa, the Humboldt Penguin in Peru, or the Galapagos Penguin in the Galapagos Islands, all face the same threat: commercial fisheries. Fish stocks are being plundered to be used as cheap feed for factory farmed animals, the very same fish which make up the penguin’s diet. The lack of food combined with climate change, habitat destruction, pollution and disease have severely impacted their numbers.

Defenders of factory farming claim that less land is used to farm the animals. What they don’t consider is the amount of land used and destroyed, to provide feed for farm animals kept in confinement. Often, this feed is produced halfway across the world, destroying the habitat of endangered native wildlife. Out of sight, out of mind?

Crucially, as I have discovered in writing my books, Farmageddon and Dead Zone: Where The Wild Things Were, factory farming fails to even achieve what it was it was conceived to do — feeding a burgeoning population.

Everyone has the power to change the world — three times a day, in fact: at breakfast, lunch and dinner.

As I travelled to research the books, everywhere I went, I found signs of hope for the future. I met farmers turning their backs on agrochemicals, pasture pioneers allowing farm animals to graze and forage, breaking free from their dependence on grain, and conservation champions making farming work with nature, not against it. It became clear to me the future of food is bright, but we must act now to make it a reality.

When animals are returned to the land in the right way — in well-managed, mixed and rotational systems — whole landscapes can come back to life, with a cascade of positive benefits for wildlife and farm animals alike.

Everyone has the power to change the world — three times a day, in fact: at breakfast, lunch and dinner. It starts with eating less, but better meat, from systems which are kinder to animals and the environment. To help save our precious wildlife from the brink of extinction, avoid factory farmed meat and dairy, instead choosing pasture-fed, free range or organic.

Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were by Philip Lymbery, RRP £12.99. Published by Bloomsbury, to receive a 30% discount order from www.bloomsbury.com and quote DEADZONE

Philip Lymbery is the CEO of leading international farm animal welfare organisation Compassion in World Farming and a prominent commentator on the effects of industrial farming. He is listed by The Grocer as one of the food industry’s most influential people. Under his leadership, Compassion’s prestigious awards have included Observer Ethical Award for campaigner of the year and BBC Radio 4 Food and Farming awards for best campaigner and educator. He is a lifelong wildlife enthusiast and lives in rural Hampshire with his wife and stepson. Philip is an avid blogger through www.acompassionateworld.org. Follow him on Twitter @philip_ciwf

Philip Lymbery, Author and CEO of Compassion in World Farming on The Power of Food and the Failure… was originally published in Farmdrop on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.