If you think chlorinated chicken sounds gross you’re in for a shock International trade secretary Liam Fox has been challenged to put his transatlantic trade negotiations where his mouth is and eat a […]

International trade secretary Liam Fox has been challenged to put his transatlantic trade negotiations where his mouth is and eat a US-style chlorinated chicken. The challenge has not been accepted. But disgusting as an animal carcass doused in chlorinated water might sound, the industrially produced chicken already sitting on supermarket shelves across the UK is being produced in a way that should put you off your lunch.

The EU bans chlorine washed chickens because of concerns over safety, but they could be allowed into the UK from the US as part of a bilateral trade deal after Brexit.

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But the real reason the British media are, to use Mr Fox’s words, so “obsessed with chlorine-washed chickens” is because the thought makes people squirm.

If you’re upset by the idea of chicken raised in conditions so squalid that the carcass needs to be decontaminated with chlorine, you should think about how chicken meat is already being produced in the UK.

The British Poultry Council says that free-range accounts for 5% and organic 1% of UK chicken production. The remaining 94% comes from intensively reared birds.

On the farm

A typical intensively reared bird lives for six weeks in a overcrowded, dimly-lit shed, which is cleaned once every six week cycle, after the chickens have been taken away to be slaughtered.

Inside the sheds the air can become polluted with ammonia from the foul droppings. This damages the chickens’ eyes and respiratory systems and causes black burns and ulcers on their legs, chests and feet. The chickens are fed large amounts of antibiotics to keep them alive.

What’s more, industrially-farmed chickens spend much of their life squatting.”The chickens are bred to reach slaughter weight in just five to six weeks – a weight it would naturally take around three months for chickens to reach, says Ian Woodhurst, the Farming Campaign Manager at World Animal Protection. “This rapid growth can cause severe health problems, such as painful lameness and strain to the animal’s heart and lungs.”

Although livestock conditions in Britian are nowhere near as bad as the hi-tech factories in the US, they aren’t the idyllic open farmyards the poultry industry likes to cultivate an image of.

Since 2012, each chicken has to be given a space the size of an A4 sheet of paper, due to an EU regulation that was considered a leap for animal welfare.

The National Farmers Union (NFU) believes that such requirements are damaging to their business. When it was suggested in January that chlorinated chicken might be imported, Martin Haworth, director of strategy at the NFU, said British farmers should be able to use the same production techniques to ensure “an even playing field”.

If chlorinated chickens were allowed to be imported, it’s likely that the standards in chicken farms would become even worse in order to push prices down.

Cheap cuts

Meat is already incredibly cheap. You can buy two chicken breasts from Tesco for £2.50. You can buy a whole chicken for £3.50.

If producing a chicken from egg to supermarket shelf costs so little money, it’s not going to have lived a life a a consumer will find easy to stomach.

Even though an intensively reared chicken is cheaper, it is three times higher in fat, one third lower in protein, and lower in beneficial omega-3 fatty acids now than it was in the 1970s, according to Philip Lymbery, chief executive of Compassion in World Farming.

There’s a massive disconnect in the West between the animal the meat comes from and what consumers puts into their mouths. We don’t need to think about it because those sterile pink blobs you buy in the shop bear no resemblance to chicken that has been fed, killed, plucked, drained, pumped up and chopped apart.

It seems Mr Fox has chickened out of the chlorinated chicken challenge. Maybe someone should ask him to eat a British chicken after visiting a chicken farm – he might find it just as unappetising.

@pascalehughes