Chicken ‘poison’ comment ruffles a few feathers
Over the weekend Dublin chef Kevin Thornton said he would not give factory-farmed chicken to his worst enemy, let alone his own children.
In a debate on supermarket chicken, he told News-talk radio: “I wouldn’t buy it [chicken sold in Irish supermarkets] and I wouldn’t give it to anybody because I would be giving them poison.
“There is a serious problem with chicken and the public are to blame because they demand cheap produce.”
Mr Thornton is joining a chorus of disapproval across the Irish Sea, where British chef Jamie Oliver and food writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall are complaining about chicken quality.
But yesterday the Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA) insisted consumers who bought Bord Bia-approved Irish chicken in supermarkets could be confident of its quality and origins.
“The standard of poultry produced here is extremely high and is among the highest in the EU if not the world,” said Ned Morrissey, the IFA’s national poultry committee chairman.
“Bord Bia standards are second to none and I’d say 99.9% of the Irish chicken in the shops is produced to these standards.”
And Tesco, Ireland’s largest grocery supermarket, said all its fresh chicken was reared and produced on the island of Ireland to Bord Bia standards.
The Bord Bia stamp meant the bird had been reared to the highest animal welfare and hygiene standards, said Mr Morrissey, a poultry farmer of Cappoquin, Co Waterford.
“The chicken is anti-biotic free and free of meat, bone and fish-meal: everything has been taken out to keep the consumer happy,” he said, insisting that Irish poultry producers could only get the Bord Bia mark if they did not use intensive farming methods of the kind Oliver and Fearnley-Whittingstall are campaigning against.
But Mr Morrissey said the catering trade in Ireland needed to take greater steps to ensure diners were served with chicken reared and slaughtered in Ireland.
“Chicken from Holland or the UK can be processed there and then brought here for further processing and then labelled as Irish.
“That’s where an awful lot of catering establishments are getting their chicken from,” he said, adding that of the thousands of restaurants in Ireland, fewer than 100 had Bord Bia’s Féile Bia quality mark to guarantee the chicken was Irish and not relabelled.
Previous claims by Meath-born chef, Richard Corrigan, over the quality of Irish chicken had a “devastating effect on the industry”, said Mr Morrissey.
Mr Thornton, who has won the catering industry’s highest awards, made his remarks on Newstalk radio.
Yesterday his spokeswoman said Mr Thornton was referring to cheap cuts of chicken and to birds retailing at €3 to €4.
Bird flu is found at the Bernard Matthews plant in Suffolk, England, leading to a drop in poultry products imported into Irish supermarkets.
A brother and sister die from the H5N1 bird-flu virus in the eastern town of Dogubayazit, close to Turkey’s border with Iran. The EU government banned poultry imports the year before following an outbreak, with Ireland announcing wide-ranging restrictions on poultry movements.
Vietnam confirms 42 deaths of humans and 93 cases of bird flu in humans while 50 million poultry are culled to limit the spread of the disease.
More than 30,000 chickens die in Japan’s first outbreak of bird flu for nearly 80 years.
