If you have an accent, I can tell where you’re from or where you’ve lived. If your speech is highly refined and your vocabulary complex, I can tell you’ve been buffed by your parents or your education to a gleaming shine. And probably you like to read quite a bit.
In the UK especially, the way you speak is a powerful indicator of your social standing. This is where the weirder your accent sounds, the posher you are. (Say this slowly – air hair lair and then you’ll see what I mean. Translated this is supposed to sound like “Oh, hi.”)
But it’s not just the way you speak. It’s where you choose to shop.
Are you a staunch patron of Waitrose? A middle of the road Sainsbury’s kind of Jamie Olivier luvly jubbly guy? Or a chirpy chipper chunky mum who loves Somerfields?
What about the stuff you buy in these shops? Bonnie Prince Charlie Duchy Originals biscuits for cheese? Carrs water crackers? Crisps?
Surely identifying a person’s character by this kind of evidence is inaccurate and frankly appalling. Right?
Hmmm. I’m about to show you how it goes even deeper than this.
It’s not about the way you speak. It’s not about the places you buy your food. It’s not even about the food you buy.
It’s how you identify with it.
This is the bit where the chicken comes in.
Last year, Channel 4 in the UK broadcast a series of programmes with the big three of British celebrity chef-dom. Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall basically had an all out mashup food fight. The overall theme however was not “My hand-knitted tortellini is way better than yours, so ner…” but a fervent campaign for the humane treatment of animals raised for food. Jamie took on the pig industry (brilliantly I might add), Hugh F-W made chickens his raison d’être and Gordon just stood about saying “fuck” a lot.
One episode of Hugh’s Chicken Out programme stood out for me, but not because of the message that free range (at the very least) is better than battery hens. (If you haven’t worked this one out for yourself by now then you don’t deserve to eat chicken at all.)
It was one particular mum who caught my attention. Hugh was doing his utmost to persuade her – in his very rural, countryside posh kind of way – that buying a £2.50 chook (or two for a fiver!) supported an horrific and inhumane industry, gave no incentive to the supermarket to change its policy, and was not really very economical anyway, seeing as she was only eating the breasts of the chicken and throwing the legs away. (!!!)
He did his best. He showed her how to make a more expensive, free-range chicken last for three days – what with a roast, and risotto and pasta sauce – and she even had the opportunity to rear a few chickens herself to see how much better their lives were when allowed out and about.
But at the end of it all, she was not to be convinced.
She slapped her hand down on a 2 for 1 batttery broiler, and declared “This is the chicken I buy. This chicken is me.”
This woman identified so strongly with her cheap chicken, it had become a part of how she saw herself.
(Please don’t mistake this as an opportunity for me to sneer at those who value cost over context – there are many who would argue that those for whom money is scarce cannot afford to have middle-class consciences. This is not what this post is about.)
My point is that we brand ourselves all the time with the words we use. And this branding is intensely powerful – the marketing world depends on it.
How are you caging yourself? What words are you using to pigeon-hole you? What stories are you telling, to yourself and to those around you, over and over and over, that reinforce your unshakeable belief that you are this, and not that? That you can have this, and not that? That these things are possible, and those…well those things only happen to other people, right?
Don’t let the way you brand yourself become a prison that prevents you from experiencing life in a different way. When you allow yourself a choice – and you have an infinite variety of these – you can choose to be whatever you want.
So now – which chicken will you choose?
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