Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: ‘This is about ethics, not class’
I do feel a bit like I’m building my own gallows,’ says Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. He’s helping OFM’s photographer build a set for his portrait in a barn on his Dorset farm. He is equally reluctant to strip off for the camera. Fearnley-Whittingstall feels exposed enough already, frankly. Surely he must have faced more nerve-racking moments in the last year, making his latest series, Hugh’s Chicken Run, about intensive poultry farming?
‘There were certainly moments of doubt, especially about creating our own intensive chicken farm,’ he says. ‘On different days there were different anxieties. On the one hand I was doing $2995 nwt celine phoebe philo black wool silk tuxedo dress fr 40 2 4 6 the opposite of what I would normally do when raising chickens. For me, putting in an order for two-and-half-thousand chicks and knowing they weren’t going to have a very nice life felt very weird and paradoxical and of uncertain outcome. But I also wondered whether the intentions behind it would be understood or whether people might have thought it was an over-dramatic or attention-seeking or gratuitous way to approach the issue.’
Chicken Run was a world away from Fearnley-Whittingstall’s gentle River Cottage series which detailed his life on a working farm, and which turned him into a one-name-celebrity, a ‘Hugh’ to Jamie Oliver’s ‘Jamie’. But it also makes sense, in the grand scheme of his work. Fearnley-Whittingstall is a vociferous campaigner for traditional, ethical farming methods. Channel 4’s River Cottage created a middle-class obsession with the idea of ‘locally sourced’ food; and it engaged us with the rearing and killing of farm animals. $2500 celine nwt new 2017 mini belt handbag cloud grained calfskin bag authentic Fearnley-Whittingstall made us appreciate how passionate local producers are about their food, and how incredibly hard they work at it. Later programmes helped us connect still more with our food by looking at how we can eat fish sustainably, how to grow your own or forage for greens; and he’s taught a new generation of viewers about the value of seasonal eating. Perhaps, $980 celine flatform platform loafers 40 most significantly, through River Cottage and Chicken Run, he has married the disparate worlds of rural and urban Britain. He’s connected us to the food we eat, and to the broader issues around the ways that we consume.
That’s not to say he isn’t aware of his limitations: ‘It’s really impossible not to be a hypocrite with these things. One can never get it right all of the time. You convert your car to LPG and then you feel like you should be in a horse and cart. Or you get a wind turbine and someone tells you it will take 100 years to generate as much energy as it took to build. What can you do? However, although it’s frustrating, it’s better to worry about these things than to ignore them. I’d rather be rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic than sitting at the front smoking a fat cigar.’
Chicken Run was a gamble. ‘We’re not the first people to have looked at the poultry industry and thrown up our hands and asked consumers: is this really what you want to eat? But in the past, it’s tended to be current-affairs documentaries with clandestine filming, programmes of a sort that either people find too dry or that they deliberately shut out because they don’t want to know. Or they do know, but it washes over them: they think, “It’s not relevant to me and my chicken in my supermarket because I’m sure they’re quite nice.” I think that by personalising it, and by me being quite affected by it at times, makes it clear that it absolutely is relevant to you in your supermarket if you buy that kind of chicken.’
Chicken Run has had an impact. ‘Informally, we’ve had lots of reports that sales of free-range and organic chickens are increasing since the programme went out; and formally from Sainsbury’s who’ve said their free-range and organic birds are flying off the shelves. We’ve also heard from the biggest poultry producer in the West Country, who does organic, free-range and Freedom-Food chickens, that they can’t keep up with the demand for free-range because the supermarkets have been 0 celine bag 17610 3xvh 01bcx increasing their orders.’
Fearnley-Whittingstall is not without his critics. Not everyone can afford to buy free-range chickens or the organic and locally produced food $140 aetrex essence shoes celine mary jane pump black leather strap 8 that he $995 new celine patent leather brown platform heels with box size advocates so passionately. ‘There are two aspects to the price question. There’s the “it’s all right for him, he’s double-barrelled, went to Eton, has a nice farm in Dorset $230 new bcbg max azria dress celine coral reef rwy6k765 sz xs and a cushy job on the telly, he can afford free-range chicken” aspect, and I think that’s irrelevant. But if by extension you’re saying, “well, it’s all right for people who lead a comfortable life and can afford to buy free-range chicken”, then OK, even if we only accept that argument, surely 30 or 40 per cent of us could afford free-range chicken – when actually it is only a tiny proportion of us who do. Less than five per cent of chickens are free-range in this country.’
Nonetheless, by taking $3k nwt celine runway silk Chicken Run to an estate on his local town of Axminster where he set up a free-range chicken run with the locals, he was taking the argument to people who didn’t feel they could afford free-range chicken. ‘Animal welfare isn’t a class issue, or even an economic one, it’s an ethical issue and people on a very low income have ethics. We’ve had some amazing letters from people on income support, who are jobless, or who are single mums, saying, “Don’t let anyone tell you that people with no money don’t care about chickens.” I had one in my hand this morning, saying, “I have to feed my family 0 celine 173823ska 18cc money on