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The Ethical Butcher is thrilled to announce the launch of the UK’s first soy free chicken! Team Ethical Butcher are always searching for producers whose ethical standards match their own, which proves a hard task when it comes to chicken. They have now had the opportunity to work alongside a farmer to create a product that ticks their strict ethics boxes, by excluding a major unsustainable player in the chicken diet; soy. The vast majority of chicken feed in the UK, including organic, includes a proportion made up of soy protein which is absolutely not in line with the Ethical Butcher’s standards. 

Ethical Butcher co-founder, Glen, has recently written a blog post on the negative environmental impacts of soy here if you have time to read the long-form, if not some bullets below:

• Soy is a mono crop, meaning it grows alone. In the USA and Brazil alone, that is over 100,000,000 tonnes in each country per year – a crop that is not a part of an ecosystem
• In the USA as much as 91% of soybean is transgenic meaning it is GMO and has been modified to be resistant to Glyphosate otherwise known as Roundup – a grade C carcinogen – suggested evidence of causing cancer, has also been linked to liver disease, birth defects and reproductive problems in laboratory animals; and may kill beneficial gut bacteria and damage the DNA in human embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells

The Ethical Butcher will be working with Mark Chapple, a regenerative farmer in Devon to rear their soy-free chickens. They use a method of farming called ‘mob grazing’ which sees livestock systematically moved around a field to graze different sections in rotation. This not only improves soil health, but ensures the animals also lead happy and healthy lives.