A Tale of Two Chickens

A Tale of Two Chickens is a short film which illustrates how we are paying a high price for food in hidden ways and why we need true cost accounting in our food and farming systems. Created with the Lexicon of Food, the Sustainable Food Trust hopes this film will help people to visualise the problem of food system externalities by comparing the stories of two chickens from two different production systems. One chicken, reared on pasture and organically grown feed, has minimal external impacts and in fact can generate actual benefits. While the other chicken, produced in a factory farm, is associated with many negative impacts which create hidden costs, such as the spread of antibiotic resistance, poor working conditions for staff and the pollution of air, soil and water. But these hidden costs are not paid by the producer, they are paid by taxpayers and society as a whole. When we buy a cheap chicken we actually pay for it twice, once at the checkout and again through taxes that go towards the subsequent environmental and health care costs. When you add up all these hidden costs, cheaper chicken is not so cheap after all.