Scene: Sunday morning in the kitchen, 9 o’clock, busy getting a casserole ready for the slow cooker. As usual, I had BBC Radio 4 on in the background, listening to the news:

Government vets have been working through the night to contain an outbreak of the deadly Asian strain of bird flu found at a Bernard Matthews farm in Suffolk. All 159,000 turkeys on the farm at Holton have been culled.

As I opened a pack of organic chicken joints, bought from the local farmers’ market, I wondered how the word “farm” could be applied to an industrial plant containing 159,000 unfortunate birds.

The government’s deputy chief vet, Fred Landeg, has rejected newspaper claims that official the response was too slow: “This was a very large turkey unit. with relatively young birds, round about 8 weeks of age, and it’s not unusual err.. to get err… a level of mortality in birds of that age…”

It was only a slight pause or two, but wouldn’t you have expected a DEFRA spokesperson to be completely unfazed at levels of mortality in industrial turkey plants? But the best was yet to come.

A virologist, Professor John Oxford, said the location of the outbreak was a surprise: “It is a mystery at this moment, and is one of the unsolved things we have to sort out is how it started there, on an ace farm, you know, with high bio-security. We all thought it was going to start on a little farm, two men and a dog, you know,” (amused / condescending tone) “an organic farm, you know which has the animals out and the birds outside.”

I couldn’t believe my ears (and if you don’t, the recording is here for a week). So the gap grows ever wider between the general public – increasingly convinced of the animal welfare and human health benefits of organic farming – and the industrial food producers and their sponsors in DEFRA.

We enjoyed our chicken casserole with a good conscience that evening – with no worries about catching bird flu.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 8:44 pm and is filed under Greenery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.