MY GIRLFRIEND only eats organic chicken. This is a dietary and ideological rule. As for me, I have a chicken habit and if I only ate the organic variety I'd be having my home repossessed for bankruptcy. I've tried sneaking regular factory broilers into her diet but she can always tell. So, last week there was a showdown in the poultry aisle. I'd made the mistake of suggesting a roaster only to be confronted by the price of organic ones. Seven pound fifty.
"Come on," I protested, "it's only three quid for an extra large self-basting battery chappie."
She shook her head and before I could launch into my critique of middle-class food snobbery, I glimpsed in her eyes the flashing image of thousands o
f caged birds with force-feeding tubes strapped to their mouths and hormone injection needles stuck up their bums. I searched for a compromise.
"How about free range?"
"No, they've still got antibiotics."
"Cornfed?"
"Still not organic!"
"Jesus!"
The compromise was finally found sitting alone among its free-range drug-free friends. All I saw was the price. Five pounds and eight pence. Sure, it was quite a bit smaller than your regular bird, but I didn't want to lose my chick over a chicken, so considered the compromise worth the investment.
It was only when I got it home and unwrapped it that I realised it was fundamentally lacking in some essential qualities. No amount of stuffing could hide the fact that this organic chicken was completely without breasts. The thing looked rather like a geriatric greyhound. Having led a long life running free in the wild it was practically an outdoor athlete, a cross-country runner, not an inch of flesh on it, just muscle and sinew.
This was confirmed when, after cooking, I tried to pull the legs off and they would not budge. Even in death, the thing was fighting. Christ, it must have taken them years to even catch the thing.
"It smells chickeny," girlfriend said, trying to sound encouraging. We nervously prodded the leathery skin with forks and scraped what little meat there was off the chest bone then stuck it back in the oven to see if more cooking might loosen the legs. Another 20 minutes and still no joy. The joints seemed almost arthritic.
As I finally tried to 'carve' it my hands skidded across the slimy surface and I could only grasp strings of rubberised sinew between my fingernails. I began to suspect that this chicken itself was excessively bourgeois, concerned with weight and the quality of nutrition. Out of the carcass we got 10 mouthfuls of the stringiest meat imaginable. Girlfriend had a hard time accepting the she was secretly lusting after a young, big breasted, juicy, fat, lazy, bottle-fed, drug-addicted broiler.
"The baked parsnips and seasoning were delicious," she said.
No amount of congratulating ourselves that we'd done the ideologically correct thing by this chicken, was going to make up for the trauma the meal had been.
It was a radical chicken, an eco chicken, it had been on hunger strike, spearheaded a campaign and achieved its aims in death.
"I don't think we'll do that again," girlfriend said.
"So, can we eat regular chickens from now on?"
"No, I mean, maybe we should just stick with roast vegetables."
The full article contains 571 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
