Peter Rhodes on experts, astronomy and what if Heaven is run by chickens?
The food expert Chris Van Tulleken launches a new Radio 4 series this week, starting with a look at our grisly relationship with chickens. Here's a statistic to make you shudder – across the world about 50 billion chickens are slaughtered each year for human consumption. Most are killed in what chickens regard as infancy.
Tulleken decided that, in order to understand chickens, he had to raise a few of his own and involve his small children in the business of life, death and chicken nuggets. Untroubled by adult tenderness, the kids cheerfully accepted the prospect of killing and eating the birds. I was reminded of our little girl, then three, who witnessed a lion devouring a gazelle on a TV nature programme. “Oh, well,” she sighed with the pragmatism of the very young,”I suppose it is delicious.”
The sheer scale of the global chicken industry reminded me, too, of a Japanese official I once heard fiercely defending his country's whaling industry. He pointed out philosophically that it takes 1,000 deaths to provide 1,000 humans with a chicken each but only one death to feed thousands of humans on whale meat. Go figure.
