Hay Festival Special
Fed with Chris van Tulleken
In this live conversation at the Hay Festival 2024, Leyla Kazim interviews Dr. Chris van Tulleken about his BBC Radio 4 series, Fed. The dis
Key takeaways
- Dr. Chris van Tlevken experimented with raising chickens, including Ross 308 and Hubbard breeds, in his own home.
- Farmer Charles Bournes shared that while conditions have improved since the 1970s, farmers often act as 'glorified farm managers' for the supply chain.
Main topics
- The Fed podcast series
- Industrial poultry farming vs. high-welfare systems
Notable quotes
I'm a glorified farm manager for the system.
Conclusion
The episode provides a profound look at the hidden complexities of foo
Transcript preview
Speaker 3 (0:00) This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Speaker 5 (0:09) Welcome to the Haunted Library. Have you come in search of a tale? This podcast invites you to browse the shelves and find stories that will linger long after you've left this place. From gothic masterpieces to pulpy penny dreadfuls, join me, Colin Morgan, with new episodes twice a week. Find the Haunted Library wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 1 (0:45) Hello everybody, welcome to Hague. It's wonderful to see you all. My name is Leila Kazim. I am a presenter on BBC Radio 4's The Food Programme and you may also recognise me from MasterChef, I'm one of those people that tastes the dishes and says whether it's good or not. And possibly like many of you here, I love food. I think about it a lot of the day, I write about it, I make shows about it, I go up and down the country meeting people who bring food to us. But unless you are as obsessed with food as I am, you might not actually know that much about where your food comes from. And so that is why today I am chatting with somebody who has created a brand new series on Radio 4 that kind of tries to address this problem. So what we eat and why we eat what we eat. And that person is Dr Chris Van Tulleken. Let's have another little round of applause. Thanks, everyone. Dr Chris, you are a doctor. Chris is Speaker 2 (1:54) fine. You Speaker 1 (1:54) are a broadcaster. Speaker 2 (1:56) And I am a doctor, yes. I'm in good standing with the General Medical Council. I also have a PhD, so I'm Dr Doctor, but I also have an honorary doctorate from Sussex, so I'm Dr Doctor Doctor, unlike Dr Zand, who is just Dr Zand. Speaker 1 (2:12) A little bit of one-upmanship with the siblings there. You mentioned children. If anyone does know of any children, you may recognise Chris from Operation Ouch, which is a kids' show which looks at what goes on in the human body and also what goes on in hospitals. Or perhaps you know Chris from BBC Two's Trust Me, I'm a Doctor, which looks at the state of healthcare in Britain. Or maybe... You have read Chris's multi-award winning, and can I just say, excellent book, Chris. My favourite read from the year so far, Ultra Processed People. Now, last year, Chris launched a brand new series on Radio 4 called Fed, which aims to look at what we eat and why we eat it. They focused on the most consumed protein on the planet, which is chicken. and I'm chatting with Chris today to basically learn a bit about what you discovered during the making of this series. So I think to begin, can you just tell us a bit about what Fed is about and why you wanted to create it? Speaker 2 (3:23) So when I'm not a doctor, I study nutrition. A lot of my patients were unwell because they couldn't choose what to eat. So I started to understand more and more through research how food affects the body. But everything I understood was really about what happens once it passes your lips. I understood the physiological changes, but I didn't understand the factors that influence choice. why we choose the food we choose. And actually, we're quite choice-impoverished in a way. So, for example, we really only eat three meats, don't we? We eat pigs and cows and chickens. Some people eat some fish without much discrimination, but that's more or less it, the odd sheep. So the programme was a deep dive kind of to solve my own sense of inadequacy about not knowing really where food comes from. Speaker 1 (4:10) And you actually got your hands dirty and you kept... some chickens in your house can you tell us a little bit about that so Speaker 2 (4:18) it was well it felt to me important if i was going to understand chicken farmers i had to at least try and become an amateur chicken farmer so a big of some chicken farmers in this country will have millions of birds maybe up probably up to five million on a farm i would think would be the biggest chicken farm in the country i had five so smaller scale and i went and got them from a bloke called steve who looks exactly like Jim Broadbent, just exactly like Jim Broadbent, but with a van full of chickens, from a slightly weird, disused motorway service station at 5am, for some reason that actually the production team never explained to me why it had to be like dealing drugs on an A road. It was very, very odd. Speaker 1 (4:59) And we actually have a clip of when you brought those chicks home and introduced them to your family. Speaker 3 (5:07) Girls. Speaker 3 (5:10) Girls? What? Speaker 8 (5:16) What Speaker 3 (5:16) have I got? Nothing? What Speaker 8 (5:18) have you got? Now Speaker 3 (5:36) we've got to be very gentle Are Speaker 8 (5:38) they Speaker 3 (5:38) chicks Speaker 8 (5:38) or dogs? They're Speaker 3 (5:39) chickens Speaker 3 (5:46) So what's his name, Sasha? Heihei. That's Heihei. OK, and who's this? Speaker 8 (5:50) Mine's called Leela. Speaker 7 (5:52) As we discuss names and start to form attachments, it seems important to warn the girls about what I've got planned. Speaker 3 (5:58) So the reason I'm keeping mine and I'm going to keep this yellow one is I'm keeping him for meat, OK? So my plan is to eat him in about eight to ten weeks when he's a grown-up, OK? And we can eat all of them. if you girls want I Speaker 8 (6:17) want to keep mine till it's a grown up yeah Speaker 3 (6:20) we'll keep them till they're grown up I don't Speaker 8 (6:22) want to eat mine Lyra Speaker 3 (6:23) do you know why they're bred to grow very quickly and die very quickly so we Speaker 8 (6:26) can eat them so Speaker 3 (6:28) people can eat them Speaker 8 (6:29) get away or kill Speaker 3 (6:30) me so we could eat I do does that bother you Speaker 8 (6:31) oh honey come back to me Speaker 3 (6:34) does that bother you Lyra Speaker 8 (6:35) not really Speaker 1 (6:39) I mean, were you nervous about explaining the project to them? Because, you know, these weren't exactly going to Speaker 2 (6:44) be... No, what I was nervous about was the context that I should have provided before the clip. This was, I think, a Tuesday morning before school. My wife had got, what, a five-year-old and a two-year-old and had dressed them and got them all ready for school. And I arrived in the middle of packing bags and brushing teeth and serving breakfast with these chickens and just... created total mayhem. So that was my main source of anxiety, was driving back going, oh, my goodness, I haven't really discussed this with Dinah. I knew my kids wouldn't care about killing them. They're small psychopaths and I knew they... They never expressed... They torture the cat and each other. They don't care. The other thing is there's a biology project. One of the big questions about chicken farming is chickens don't live very long. So the chickens that you all eat, and some of you will... perhaps eat organic chicken, but the 98 % of chickens or thereabouts have the same lifespan as a housefly. So they live less than 40 days on average, a UK chicken. And part of the project was we got two different breeds. We got these Ross 308s, which are the fastest growing broilers that have been selectively bred to grow at incredible speeds. And then we got this... French breed, the Hubbard, that is the free-range breed, and they grow a bit slower. So there was also a kind of weird genetic element to this of going, if I treat them in the same way, is it their genes or is it the