Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Running around

Sometimes things just don't work out the way you want: my intention to get to Naas for the farmer's market Saturday fizzled as the day turned greyer and greyer and the mud stuck to the bottom of my boots, making that horrid schlocking sound when I walked. It was a day for a book and cocoa.

Which meant that when Monday rolled around, I had to do some grocery shopping. Little One and I donned our soggy jackets and headed into town, where we have three choices: Harvest Fare, the little, funky health store owned by one of his classmates' parents; Dunnes, in the new shopping centre, and Kenny's SuperValu on Main Street. I always start at Harvest Fare, where they have figured out how quickly we burn through soy milk, and now order it without being asked. But Mary, the owner, is a militant vegetarian, and recoiled visibly when I asked her where I might find organic meats. I favor the local store, which means across the main street to Kenny's I go, where the usual mass-produced fare is interspersed with a few local and homemade items (pies and jams live near the butcher case). Every now and then, they have a few trays of organic meats and the odd free range chicken.

This Monday, there is one lonely free range chicken. Its label notes that it is fully traceable, something foreign to Americans (and resisted by the US meat industry), but essential in a country where BSE is a very real possibility. My chicken's label tells me it is from Martin Nash's farm (2) in Ardagh in County Limerick.


Out of curiosity, I wonder what I can find out about this chicken and its life before my pot (its carcass is bubbling away in the stockpot as I write). I plug his name into the search engine, and learn from the Limerick Leader that he was the first in his area to harvest silage this spring. Martin, who puts his good fortune down to reseeding his fields, is referred to as a dairy farmer.

I find no more mention of Martin, but further digging unearths ugliness in the industry. On the heels of a protest in 2004 by the West Limerick Co-op Poultry Producers Association Limited, (I briefly wonder if Martin is one of the approximately 28 members), the government is asked to intervene (no surprise, they decline). It appears that standard practice is for corporate processors to supply day-old chicks and feed to producers as well as cover some costs. The producer then provides labor and other overhead, including electricity. Producers receives a negotiated price per bird--and this is where the protest came in. In this particular case, the producers involved were protesting the low price of 30.85 cent per bird, which includes the transport of the birds to the processing plant. (Yes these are Euro cents, but gas also costs upwards of $6 a gallon.) I take another look at the label on my bird: that's right, it cost me €12.59.

I am sincerely hoping that Martin received more than a handful of coins for this chicken; but more importantly, I am hoping against hope that Martin could give the bird a relatively good life, and that the breed of chicken is not the standard white thing. I recognize that visualizing him raising chicks hatched from eggs laid by happy heritage birds on the green rolling hills of his Ardagh farm is a pipe dream.

The heady aroma and steam from the stockpot tell me my stock is finished. I seriously toy with leaving the whole chicken story alone, but it's like a scab I can't stop picking. How is free range defined in Ireland? In the States, I know that it is a hollow term that means that the creatures have access to the a barren spot of ground for a very minimum amount of time, usually in a way that makes no significant difference in their feed or behavior. I want to know that the regulations here give some meaning to the word. So I keep digging.

I find the latest EU directive, from 2007, that states that indoor chickens can be kept at a density of about 18 birds per square meter of floor space, which is more than a little cramped. Free range chickens, as the name implies, have complete access to an outdoors that must have vegetation (and can include orchards, woodland and other pasture) and are provided with shelter which they can go into as they choose. The farmers must provide four square meters per bird. That same area in high-density floor confinement would be stuffed with 72 birds in Ireland or 80 birds in the US.

As I pick the last bits of meat off the bones of Martin's broiler, that knowledge means that I can breathe a little easier. And so can Martin's chickens, running around the green rolling hills of his farm in Limerick.