I'm getting increasingly uncomfortable with the way our culture is fetishising food. Both Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, both charming and intelligent men, are currently on our televisions lionising "back to basics" cooking - either Italian "peasant" food or smallholder's lifestyle as an experiment. Yet the media coverage and tie-in merchandising is essentially taking working-class rural values and packaging them for consumption by the urban middle-classes as a lifestyle choice.
Our local Tescos has a long aisle of meat, with loads of chickens on sale for about three quid. All the legs of those chickens either have evidence of nasty burns, or have had really offensive marks snipped off them before they are packaged. Cartons of chicken stock take pride of place next to these sorry carcasses.
Not only are we subjecting these poor animals to miserable, tortured lives in our efforts to get cheaper produce, but we're not even respecting them enough to use every bit of them when we cook. How many households take the meat off a three-quid chicken, chuck the bones away without boiling them up because they've already got a carton of stock in the fridge, and then settle down to watch Jamie and Hugh pandering to their aspirational leanings?
At what point did eating a decent-tasting chicken become comparable with buying a BMW or going on holiday to the Dominican Republic as a sign of affluence and suburban one-upmanship?
Just come across this - 2+ years on, same old rant... at least now the supermarkets are fretting how their going to get their hands on enough free range birds to keep up with demand.
Tesco's still has a mountain of 2-for-a-fiver specimens last time I was in there.
Posted by: Mali | February 27, 2008 at 04:33 PM