The truth about Britain’s CHICKEN obsession: In 1958, it was a luxury only 1 per cent of us ate. Now we consume 1.1BILLION of the birds a year. So why ARE we so addicted – and where does it REALLY come from?

Back in 1958, a pioneering advertising agency called W.S. Crawford commissioned its research department to find out what the people of Britain were eating. It spoke to 4,000 families, face-to-face. The finished report, The Foods We Eat, is a fascinating book, showing how different some of our parents’ and grandparents’ diets were – consuming blancmange, spam and stewed fruit, gallons of tea and hardly any wine.

But the most dramatic change over the past two generations has been the meat we eat. At the midday meal back then, beef was by far the most popular dish, with a third of the country having it on Sunday. It was followed by lamb, white fish, eggs, pork, sausages, offal, corned beef and luncheon meat, pies and finally cheese. Chicken was less popular than all these options and consumed by just 1 per cent of the population.

The report said: ‘Poultry as a dish is slowly gaining ground but its general consumption is still negligible.’

Now? Chicken is the No 1 meat in the UK, by a country mile. The proliferation of chicken shops on every high street is proof enough, but official government figures show that the average adult eats 189g of chicken each week at home.

This may not sound a vast amount, but it compares to 84g of beef, 23g of mutton or lamb, 41g of pork, 5g of corned beef and 4g of offal. We eat more chicken than all the other meats combined.

Pen Vogler, food historian and author of Scoff: A History Of Food And Class in Britain, says: ‘It’s a huge change. Historically, chicken was a luxury and, in fact, seen as slightly effeminate. Real Brits ate beef, or aspired to eat beef.’

There are many reasons why chicken has become so popular in Britain – reasons that shed light on our changing diets as well as the state of the economy.

But experts are warning that the country’s poultry farmers are unable to keep up with the enormous demand, with the Government exacerbating problems.

This month, the National Farmers Union (NFU) warned that, as a country, we are producing less of our own food than 30 years ago. Back in 1995 we were producing 94 per cent of all the chicken that we ate. The NFU says this has fallen to 87 per cent.

This, however, paints an overly optimistic picture. The figure refers only to raw chicken – a whole bird you might buy for a roast, or wings and breasts you would cook.

If you take into account ready meals – as well as chicken served in hospitals and schools – as little as 60 per cent of the chicken consumed in the UK is British, according to the British Poultry Council.

Most supermarkets like to trumpet how they champion British farmers. But I have spotted in Sainsbury’s a chicken teriyaki wrap and a frozen chicken dinner both made using chicken from Thailand.

In Aldi, a chicken tikka wrap is ‘produced using Thai chicken’ and a Southern Style Munch Box with chicken goujons is ‘produced using Chinese chicken’.

Tesco has a stonebaked BBQ chicken pizza using Thai chicken and Halal chicken nuggets made using Chinese meat. Asda has battered chicken nuggets from Poland and frozen lemon pepper chicken skewers from Thailand again.

This imported poultry is necessary because British farmers cannot keep up with the demand, even though we are now slaughtering 1.1billion chickens a year in the UK. We have developed an insatiable poultry appetite for two simple reasons: money and health.

‘It is the cheapest protein per kilogram. And we know that people are wanting to save money, so price is crucial,’ says Moneeba Fokeerbaccus, strategic insights director at Worldpanel, a research company that tracks the shopping baskets of 30,000 consumers. Chicken is the only meat that is growing in popularity.

We added an extra 42million kilos of chicken into our collective shopping baskets over the past 12 months, according to Worldpanel, a mind-boggling figure. In contrast, lamb, pork and particularly beef have fallen in popularity. Many families just cannot afford beef on a regular basis.

In 1958, the year The Foods We Eat was published, the price of poultry was 54p per lb, while beef was 45p per lb. Now, chicken is £3.78 per kg, while beef is £8.43, according to the Office for National Statistics.

It is cheap because over the past few generations, particularly in America, farmers have cross-bred different varieties to create a bigger, cheaper, more profitable bird with larger breasts, delicious flesh, and which can be slaughtered after just five weeks.

‘It’s somewhere between 35 and 38 days from arrival on the farm to slaughter. The efficiency and productivity in these birds is phenomenal,’ says Richard Griffiths of the British Poultry Council. Cattle, in contrast, take at least 18 months before they can be slaughtered.

The cheapness of chicken has played a role in its popularity for some time, but what’s really taken off in the past couple of years is Britain’s obsession with protein. The fact that chicken is high in protein and relatively low in fat makes it the perfect meat in an age when an increasing number of adults are on weight-loss drugs or trying to boost their protein intake to build muscles.

In addition, recent years have seen red meat increasingly associated with cancer, especially bowel tumours. ‘People are going protein mad – and chicken is seen as “clean” by most consumers, compared with red meat which is seen as more of a treat,’ says Fokeerbaccus.

A chicken breast contains 32g of protein per 100g, compared with 31g in a lean beef steak, according to the British Nutrition Foundation.

Aldi has seen sales of its chicken mince jump by 43 per cent in the past year – an enormous leap considering beef mince has increased by less than 5 per cent. Indeed, the demand for all things chicken has encouraged Aldi to bring out a range of meatballs made from chicken later this month, rather than the more normal pork or beef.

‘Chicken has really taken flight with Aldi shoppers as it’s a source of protein that offers great value,’ says Julie Ashfield, chief commercial officer at Aldi. ‘We’ve sold over

120million packs of fresh poultry this year so far, compared with around 90million packs of beef, showing just how firmly chicken has become a family favourite.’

Tesco says it sold 184million packs of chicken last year, a 26 per cent increase compared to 2023. And Brits’ obsession with protein meant that it launched a range of ready meals in April called High Protein, where five out of the six dishes were chicken-based.

All this means that food companies are having to look overseas to supply enough chicken to stock the supermarket shelves, particularly to Brazil, Poland, Thailand, the Netherlands and even China.

Does this matter? Yes, it does, according to British farmers. Jo Hilditch is a fourth-generation farmer in Herefordshire. Her grandfather was mostly a cattle farmer, but now the farm is predominantly poultry.

‘We don’t want protectionism. We just want everyone to know that we are producing chicken to great standards,’ she says. Referring to the more than 500 people becoming ill with salmonella over the summer from eggs that were imported, she adds: ‘Imported food is not produced to the same standard. We are concerned about Brazilian chicken meat imports.’ The source of the salmonella outbreak has not yet been disclosed.

But the British Poultry Council said Brazilian and Thai farms supplying the UK adhered to the same standards. Many animal welfare campaigners point out that there are no legal limits on stocking densities – how many birds they can stock per square metre – in Thailand or Brazil, as there are in the UK.

And in China farms routinely trim birds’ beaks, a technique used to prevent feather pecking and cannibalism and managing stress in crowded conditions. Beak trimming is not allowed in the UK, because it is considered by many to be cruel.

Jo Hilditch adds: ‘Here in the UK we have brought down our antibiotic usage because of public pressure since 2012 by something like 86 per cent. I think that meat coming in from abroad with higher antibiotics is a real concern.’

Ironically, supermarkets have caused a lot of the problems by deciding to improve the welfare of British chickens that are barn-reared. This is the term for birds that are not free range. Nearly all the chicken we eat in the UK (97 per cent) is barn-reared, a figure that has increased during the cost of living crisis.

Poultry welfare is most commonly measured by stocking density. Previously, most supermarkets went with 38kg/m², which translates to about 17 birds in one square metre, the size of the floor of a red phone box. Over the past two years, supermarkets have moved to 30kg/m² (about 13 birds). Eight out of ten chickens produced in Britain are now at this improved standard, which is sometimes labelled as ‘room to roam’.

This may be better news for the chickens, but it’s caused problems for farmers who now have to spread out their birds. Jo Hilditch used to have 590,000 birds on her farm, but she now can have only 472,000 birds. Surely she could just build another barn? ‘I’ve got planning [applications] in at the moment for four sheds, which would directly replace some of the really old sheds that my dad built – they would be sheds which cut down on odour, noise pollution, on emissions, with better technology.’

But the local planning authority has so far taken 18 months and not approved any building works. The councillors in Herefordshire are ‘making it a difficult process because they’re worried about judicial review challenges,’ she says.

Her problems are echoed across the industry.

The British Poultry Council’s Richard Griffiths says: ‘There are more than 100 farm applications in the system around the country that just aren’t moving.’

One of the biggest food companies in Britain is Cranswick, which used to be predominantly a sausage and pork producer but now increasingly supplies chickens and poultry-based ready meals to supermarkets. It slaughters

1.5million chickens a week, but would like to double this to three million to help meet the demand from consumers. After four years of tortuous negotiation with a local council, it finally abandoned a plan to build a so-called mega-farm in Methwold, Norfolk last year.

‘The whole planning system is falling down,’ says a senior director at Cranswick. He doesn’t lay all the blame at councils, or residents that block buildings in their neighbourhood, but also at lobbying groups that oppose large-scale farming, such as the Worldwide Fund For Nature, which campaigned against the Methwold site.

Cranswick now hopes to build a large £200million site in Grimsby. It is not a farm but a slaughterhouse and processing facility, which could handle 1.75million birds a week. It submitted its application this month.

‘It would create 1,400 jobs in Grimsby, and help the UK be less reliant on imports. But where we get the extra chickens from – that’s what we’re trying to work out,’ the Cranswick director says.

Where indeed? The only answer, say industry insiders, is for Andy Burnham’s Government to tell local authorities to prioritise food security as much, for instance, as Net Zero or biodiversity.

Many people have understandable concerns about so-called factory farming, but when it comes to poultry, standards in the UK have improved considerably in the past two years.

As Richard Griffiths says: ‘Large-scale farming is necessary to feed this country. We need a reliable, efficient food source, and that’s where chicken comes in.’