Bernard Matthews

Published in The Guardian Friday 26 November 2010

In 1950, British people ate less than a kilogram of poultry a year. Now they eat 25 times as much. Chicken and turkey reign supreme, more often than not tumbled, extruded, breaded, shaped and formed into kievs, tikkas, burgers, turkistrami or nuggets – a shift in national eating habits due in no small part to Bernard Matthews, who has died aged 80. As his US-inspired vision of making turkey affordable for all grew, he became a standard-bearer for the poultry industry, both in Britain and internationally.

I was granted an audience with Norfolk's turkey king back in 1990, when questions were beginning to be asked about the animal welfare, human health and environmental impact of vast industrial farming operations. From a newspaper point of view, the multimillionaire was seen primarily as a rags-to-riches business story. So though notoriously publicity-shy, Matthews had clearly assumed that a young, female journalist would write sales-boosting copy about his latest processed-turkey products.

Behind the splendid Jacobean facade of his headquarters at Great Witchingham Hall, north-west of Norwich, which featured in his advertisements of the time, there were no longer turkeys being reared in the bedrooms. That was how Matthews had started, with just 20 eggs and a paraffin incubator. Born in the Norfolk village of Brooke, he was the son of a mechanic father, won a scholarship to the City of Norwich school, did his national service in the RAF and began his working life with the insurance company Commercial Union. In 1953 he married his wife, Joyce, and two years later they bought the run-down mansion that became their base.

Indeed, the interior was still very run-down at the time of my visit, though the hierarchical nature of Matthews's relationship with his staff was very striking. His midnight-blue Rolls-Royce, complete with chauffeur, sat outside. His PR advisers stood by deferentially, but he ruled the roost. Matthews was no figurehead brand, but a hands-on boss who had a firm grip on his business, with all the force and focus of the self-made man.

After some diplomatically neutral questions, I raised the matter of his two recent prosecutions for polluting local rivers with processing effluent, and asked to be shown round one of his windowless poultry sheds. The already brisk, businesslike atmosphere chilled. When I put to him the increasingly current view that some of his products were made with mechanically recovered meat that was turned into a sort of slurry, he insisted that I phone my editor, in his presence, to obtain a guarantee that any article could be vetoed before publication. When that was not forthcoming, he abruptly terminated the interview, and I was driven back to Norwich in the Rolls-Royce.

In the decades since, the Matthews brand has come to symbolise the spectacular growth of cheap poultry consumption, based on intensive indoor production. The American approach, which he went to see for himself early in the venture, depended on modern, indoor "broilerhouse" production and the widespread use of freezers.

However, the brand once advertised as "bootiful" also came to embody everything that food campaigners believe is wrong with factory farming. On the quality front, Matthews's turkey products have featured in reports that claim that water is added to increase weight. "Chicken breast" sold under the brand, for instance, consists of 80% chicken, the other 20% being water and chemical additives. When the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver set about his mission to improve school meals, he identified the ubiquitous Bernard Matthews Turkey Twizzler – made with only 34% turkey meat – as an example of the lowest common legal denominator of poultry products, precisely the sort of food that children should not be fed. The product was withdrawn in 2005.

The following year, two employees admitted ill-treating birds at a Bernard Matthews unit in Haveringland, Norfolk, by playing "baseball" with live turkeys. Their lawyer told the court that the men were influenced by "peer pressure" at the factory, but the company took out full-page newspaper advertisements reassuring shoppers that its employees were "conscientious people".

Bird experts have long argued that intensive poultry operations were magnets for disease. They doubtless felt vindicated when the H5N1 strain of bird flu surfaced in the UK for the first time, in 2007, at a Bernard Matthews plant at Holton, Suffolk, calling into question the much-vaunted "bio-security" of such state-of-the-art units.

But for all that the Bernard Matthews products regularly ruffle feathers, the eternal appeal of more or less instant morsels of bland white meat in a deep-fried breadcrumb crust has proved more potent. In 1971 the company was floated on the stock exchange, and within five years was posting profits of £2.5m, shipping frozen, oven-ready birds to continental Europe and exporting turkey eggs to the US. In 2000 Matthews took the company private again. He was appointed CBE in 1992 and CVO in 2007.

The company now has an annual turnover of £335m and even employs the chef Marco Pierre White as its "turkey ambassador".

Matthews is survived by Joyce, two daughters and two sons.

1. •Bernard Trevor Matthews, businessman, born 24 January 1930; died 25 November 2010
   

I’ve seen a vision from hell ... it’s how we farm our lethal chickens

Published in Sunday Herald on 10th October 2009

Consider the three Cs: Chicken, Campylobacter, Complacency.

First, chicken, Britain’s most most popular meat. The Food Standards Agency encourages us to eat it because its flesh is low in fat.

Second, campylobacter, a nasty food poisoning bug that kills 80 people in Britain every year and poisons hundreds of thousands more. The Food Standards Agency has just admitted that more than three-quarters of the UK-reared chicken on our supermarket shelves is contaminated with it. Third, complacency. The Food Standards Agency is nevertheless adamant that this “longstanding problem” (levels of contamination are going up, not down) is “not caused by modern production methods”.

Oh really? Let’s add a fourth C here. Concerned? We ought to be. The government agency charged with ensuring that our food is safe to eat continues to promote a meat on nutrition grounds in the full knowledge that it will very likely to be contaminated with pathogenic bacteria.

Why is it burying its head in the sand ? Our chicken production system is a can of worms and neither the industry nor regulators know what to do about it. Better just slam on the lid and pretend it’s not as bad as it seems. But these high rates of campylobacter contamination in our poultry flag up an unpalatable truth. Our intensive, supposedly “biosecure” chicken production system stinks, both literally and metaphorically. It is no surprise whatever that our poultry comes with a disturbing little side order of pathogens.

Poultry breeders rarely open the doors of their sordid sheds because they fear that the public would “misinterpret”, that is, be shocked by, what they see. I once visited an industrial chicken unit with Radio 4’s Food Programme. I will never forget it.

The vast windowless shed, about three times the size of a school gym, stank so much that it made you want to gag. It was quite hard to breathe because of the circulating dust that hung in the foetid air. It took my eyes a minute to adjust to what I was seeing. It looked like a moving white carpet but actually, it was just wall-to-wall chicken, birds so closely packed that you couldn’t make out any space between them.

Like something out of a horror film, a zombie-eyed worker was walking in parallel lines up and down the length of the unit, picking his way through the birds, extracting chickens that were either dead, decomposing, or on their last legs, then dropping them into buckets; presumably for disposal, possibly to be recycled into animal feed. It was like a vision from hell, yet 82% of the chickens we eat are produced this way.

Mind you, even this disturbing experience was capped by my visit to a high-speed chicken slaughter line. This was when I saw the birds being shackled by their legs, passed into a bath of water with an electric current in it designed to stun them then shunted on to a rotating blade designed to cut their throats.

The water was murky because of the sheer number of birds that were being passed through it. It was apparent to me that some of the birds were still conscious when they came out of their ­electrified bath. Once their throats were cut, some of them still writhed around on the floor. “Just a muscular reaction” I was assured. “They don’t feel a thing.” I wasn’t convinced.

There’s no escaping it: our intensive, industrial poultry production chain is an unsanitary reservoir of disease. Profitability lies in packing in obscene numbers of birds in fundamentally unnatural, crowded circumstances that pose a threat to both animal and human health.

As scientists at the University of Bristol have shown, farm animals are more susceptible to campylobacter and also salmonella infection “when they are in a poor environment, fed a poor diet and/or are under physical or psychological stress”. If these systems aren’t stressful, what is ?

It’s not just food poisoning that we should be concerned about here, but also the misuse of antibiotics to keep a lid on infection rates. What is emerging now is that the use in factory farming of certain key groups of antibiotics is compromising the efficacy of closely-related families of drugs in human medicine.

On intensive chicken units, there is now high resistance among birds to two of the most important antibiotics for treating ­campylobacter in humans. A new strain of the hospital-acquired infection, MRSA, is spreading rapidly on intensive farms on the Continent and passing to people, even on mainland Britain. Research into VRE, another hospital bug, found that it was transmitted to humans from pigs and poultry.

What exactly do the powers that be propose to do about this unsavoury state of affairs ? In the case of the latest campylobacter figures, the answer seems to be “nothing much”.

The Food Standards Agency has kneejerk recourse to another familar C – cooking. Don’t be dismayed if your chicken is heaving with bacteria when you buy it, it tells us, it’s up to consumers to cook their way out of potential disaster. All bugs can be killed off by thorough cooking. Just don’t don’t let your potentially lethal chicken touch any other foods or kitchen surfaces.

As for the mainstream poultry industry, it has another C up its sleeve by way of solution- chlorine.

Let’s rinse all raw poultry in bleach to reduce the “surface loading” of food poisoning bugs. The fly in the ointment here is the EU, which has banned the practice, not unreasonably, because to do otherwise would amount to official acknowledgement that our industrial poultry producers cannot control the nasty little stockpot of diseases they are incubating.

Don’t expect either the industry or the government to make our mass-produced poultry safe or wholesome.

If you only trade up on one food you regularly eat, let it be chicken. Buy the occasional free-range, preferably organic, bird from lower-density, less-intensive flocks or stop eating chicken entirely.

Be under no illusions, factory farmed chicken just keeps getting worse.