Which makes it a fair question: why free-range meat is tough, while the supermarket sort you could cut with a fork. It isn’t about quality — we’ve never cut corners there — but about two very concrete things: how long the animal lived, and how much it moved.

Why free-range meat is tough (and supermarket meat isn’t)

Start with the supermarket. Those birds are young — very young. Fed fast to grow fast, they take about 37 days — just over five weeks — to go from “chicks” to “meat” on the plate. Some make it to 50 days, long enough to hit 3 kg. Whether that’s good luck or a curse, I couldn’t say.

Idle muscles, tender meat

Age is only half the story. The other half is that the animals don’t move. Not all farms are the same, but the standard is the shed: birds packed so tightly that movement is all but impossible — in some cases near-total stillness for their entire (short) life. And a muscle that never works stays flabby. Et voilà: tender meat. Sure you still want it?

Oh, and one more thing: every broiler farm is required to treat its animals with antibiotics, given the density of birds and the diseases that come with it. And where do you suppose the antibiotic residues left in the meat end up?

The clip below gives you an idea of how an intensive farm works. Fair warning: it’s not for everyone, nor for the squeamish. But it helps you understand what you’re eating.

How our own animals live

Here’s how “our” birds live, instead. The video lower down is the morning wake-up: the dash out of the coop into the run where they spend the night (sorry, fox 🙂).