Special Report Supermarkets: Chicken

Felicity Lawrence

1st September, 2004

Wander down the meat aisle of any supermarket and you will find mountains of chicken being sold at unbelievably cheap prices. The real reasons for this cannot be found on the label.

It was the scald tank that got me in the end. I had expected trouble in the slaughter room, but we’d moved through there without incident. We’d already passed the electrocution bath, and I’d slipped easily enough round the neck cutters slicing through carotid arteries. There wasn’t as much blood as I’d feared.

I had been smuggled into a large chicken factory by a meat-hygiene inspector who was worried about standards in the poultry industry. We were gazing into a hot-water tank into which the dead birds were being dipped at the rate of 180 a minute, to scald the skin and loosen the feathers before they went into the plucking machine.

It was 3pm and, as at many factories, the water was only changed once a day. It was a brown soup of faeces and feather fragments, and, the hygiene inspector pointed out, at 52 degrees centigrade, ‘the perfect temperature for salmonella and campylobacter organisms to survive and cross-contaminate the birds’. We moved on to the whirring rubber fingers that remove the feathers. ‘Plucking machines exert considerable pressure on the carcass, which tends to squeeze faecal matter out onto the production line. It only takes one bird...

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