You might not be familiar with eating old hens, but your grandparents will (probably, if they grew up on or near a farm that is). So, what the cluck is a spent hen? Unfortunate name aside, a spent hen is a former commercial egg laying chicken. Modern commercial egg laying hens are bred to pop out around 300 eggs per a year.
For some perspective on just how many that is, chicken’s wild ancestor, red junglefowl, lay around a dozen per year. When young, these hens (also known as pullets) start laying eggs at about 5 months old, but at 15 to 17
months their egg production slows down. At this point, because the bird hasn’t been bred specifically to be eaten, it will be taken to a slaughterhouse to await a potential destiny in pet food or be frozen and shipped abroad for folks to eat before being replaced with a younger hen.
Why don’t we eat spent hens?
Industrialised poultry farming has removed the need to eat spent hens today, however it seems crazy that these edible hens are removed from our food chain. Modern chicken production — for both meat and eggs — is big business. 94% of the 2.2 million chickens consumed in the UK daily come from intensively reared birds. Free-range accounts for just 5% and organic 1% and last year we ate 12.6 billion eggs, according to the British Egg Council.
Industrially farmed broiler chicken (raised specifically for its meat) are bred quickly to be as big as possible, with lots of easy-slicing white meat. Today consumers can pick one up in a supermarket for less than the price of a pint of beer. In 1950s Britain, chicken was a treat where most people ate less than a kilo over a year.
A spent hen was likely to have made it to the dinner table of a British farmer or smallholder in a time of post-war rationing where nose-to-tail eating was a practical way to make the most of what you had. Now we eat more than 2kg of chicken a month, averaging 25kg in a year.
