June 1st 2008
Jamie Oliver Suffocates Baby Chicks On Cooking Show
Filed under: animals, food & drink — michael @ 9:03 am
There is a certain degree of frankness found in British media and PSAs that one would probably be shocked to experience here in the U.S. I discovered this first hand while living in New Zealand and being completely bowled over by their drunk driving commercials. Needless to say, they get to the point — and do not skimp on the horrors of such accidents.
Anyways, the reason I’m drawing these parallels is because of a demonstration that Jamie Oliver put on a few months back as part of his efforts to reveal the brutal practices of Britain’s poultry and egg industry.
During his cooking show Jamie’s Fowl Dinners, the famous naked chef amused guests by revealing some baby chicks as the centerpiece for their tables. After some instruction, he then asked those sitting at the table to remove the males from the females and place them in a box. As Jamie points out, since male chicks do not lay eggs, they are expendable and ultimately culled by the industry.
In front of his now stunned guests, Oliver then shows how the chicks are killed. It’s not an easy thing to watch — but for those of us that eat meat, it begs the question then of “Why do we do it?”.
I really wish American television had such revealing programming. We could all definitely use more education on factory farming — and what exactly happens behind-the-scenes before arriving on our dinner plates.
Bravo, Jamie and the BBC.
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I live in Britain, and the don’t drink drive etc. ads are more extreme than that, and we still have a huge drink and drive problem. The American media must be all sweetness and light judging from this article, if they can’t show what happens in the poultry industry!
I agree with you - that programme persuaded me finally to go vegetarian though I had been considering it for some time.
Sophie — I could never imagine ABC, NBC, or CBS airing something like this. Never. Sure, we’ll show people being killed and murdered, but never anything to do with how food is processed.
Jamie Oliver uses many different kinds of dead animals in his recipies, all of them murdered in one way or another. I am wondering if he himself has learned anything from his own demonstration.