Why chicken was off the menu - until now
This month, The Long Table made a rare purchase of chicken. You may have noticed that it doesn’t feature on our menu - you're more likely to find vegan or vegetarian dishes, beef, venison, hogget or pork on our board. That’s because we’re very fussy about our meat sourcing. We don’t buy a lot of meat, and when we do it’s from hyper-local farms. Often, as in the case of our hogget, it’s organic. In other cases – such as our pork, from Wick Court Farm – it's extremely close to organic, just not certified. In all cases, we have a close relationship with the farmers who raise the livestock, we have visited their farms, and we respect their principles. We never buy intensively reared meat, and only buy directly from farmers, never via middlemen. That’s great for ensuring transparency and high standards. It’s also a barrier to buying chicken.
“there was no local farm that met our ethical standards and was able to supply us wholesale.
Chicken was off the menu - until...Good Small Farms”
Chicken, whether intensively farmed or organic, tends to be raised on a small number of large-scale farms and sold to large retailers. It’s sometimes raised at a very small scale by local suppliers, but often only for direct-to-customer sales (via farm shops or meat box schemes). Until recently, there was no local farm that met our ethical standards and was able to supply us wholesale. Chicken was off the menu - until we heard that our friends at Good Small Farms had begun to raise organic chickens for meat, and they’d be available on a wholesale basis.
Good Small Farms, at Hammonds Farm, Wick Street, has long been our principal local vegetable supplier. We’ve also been buying eggs from them, for our cake making and meals, since 2024. Now they’ve branched out into meat, offering organic, pasture-for-life beef and chicken. Their chickens are Hubbards, and spend their lives roaming and foraging the farm’s fields. Here was a small, local, regenerative producer we knew and trusted, offering the highest possible quality chicken! We were thrilled, and delighted to be able to support Good Small Farms in their mission to model a sustainable way of farming that nourishes soil, community and health – as well as rightly making profit.
So when you come down to the Mill, you may see chicken on the menu for the first time.
If you’d like to find out more about the factors that make nutritious, responsibly farmed food so much more expensive than industrially produced food - and in particular the significant price difference between industrially farmed chicken and organic, sustainably farmed chicken - why not come along to the first of our Farm Table Talks on Saturday, April 11, where we’ll be discussing pricing, environmental responsibility, nutrition, and much more with Eric Walters, founder of Good Small Farms.
The evening will start with a delicious meal lovingly prepared with seasonal produce from Good Small Farms, followed by a talk and Q&A with Eric Walters and myself (Alex Clark, The Long Table’s Food Resilience lead) in the Sanctuary.
Book your tickets here on our events page. The price includes dinner and helps us cover our costs. As ever, if you need a ticket on us, they’re available to book on a first-come, first-served basis.
For more information about the amazing work going on at Good Small Farms, do check out them out at goodsmallfarms.co.uk/