Priced out of the Revolution?
posted by Jess Sains
A week or two ago Devon based celebrity chef and farmer Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall began his ‘Chicken Out’ campaign. The aim of the project was to show the great British public the cruel and dank conditions in which the usual supermarket £2.50-£3.00 chicken is reared.
Hugh carried out his own experiment, rearing a shed of intensively housed broiler hens; killing off at the drop of a hat those who did not meet weight targets (talk about the death of size zero…) and those that were injured. At one point the Devonian chef was in tears at the thought of killing another chick – and the country no doubt wept with him.
However, perhaps the most interesting part of the ‘Chicken Out’ campaign was based within a local Axminster estate. The community worked together, with a little bit of Channel 4 money behind them, to clear a vegetable patch and build a small hen house with a wire, “free range†run. Then, over a period of months, veggies were grown, chickens were reared: all became food.
It all seemed vastly empowering, the community, proud together working in the fields and growing their own food. Until you think there is a fairly upper-class man behind this. Until you see the bolshy single mum, Hayley – the most vocal member of the estate growers group – heading off to Tesco to buy her cheapo chickens, two for a fiver. Affordable and so tempting when you’re on the dole, no doubt. And therein lies the question: are the working-classes priced out of the revolution?
We can look back over the course of history and see the middle classes controlling political change. After all, those who have money have time and, often, have education to go with that time. Lenin could write Iskra, read Marx, flee Russia and return because he was not toiling on the fields all day, or working in a factory. Che Guevara was a doctors son, and a trained doctor himself, versed in political thinking through extensive reading an ailing child. How many poverty-stricken working class children would have lived through these childhood illnesses? Even the miner’s strike of 1984 only occurred because a middle-class government attempted to close down the pits, not because of the low pay and life conditions which had been tolerated for years, because people were too busy working to revolt, to reliant on the wage they brought in to revolt.
Capitalism is clever: it tempts us all with the lure of cheap. We are all so busy consuming we forget to be political, to force change, to dream of anything but our new television (flat screen, digital ready). Asda gave the working woman a £5 trouser/shirt combo this week, and who wouldn’t consider that quite a bargain? Who wouldn’t buy to full, fat chickens for £5, as well? Particularly those of us to whom £5 represents most of an hours work or a large chunk of their weekly benefits.
We are bludgeoned daily with the little things, the stigma of poverty, of drug use, of drinking more than one small glass of red wine in the evening, of eating too much or too little, of spending too much, house prices, football teams, being responsible for ones actions, the NHS. All the while there is celebrity, so close you can almost touch it; just get on Big Brother and it is yours. Then you can have it all; the money, the beauty, the time.
And there it is: time. Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall, well intentioned as he is, is a celebrity chef, a farmer he gets paid a lot of money for doing relatively little work. I was talking to someone the other day who spent ten hours a day putting frozen peas in to their compartment for British Airways in-flight meals, for minimum wage. Ten hours a day, of mind-numbing pointless pea scooping…
It is no wonder there is no sign of the revolution, we’re all too busy relaxing, drinking or sleeping to revolt. We’re all priced out of it.
January 26th, 2008
