Talking Chicken at Green Man 2025

FAI Veterinary Consultant Laura Higham explains how and why she was talking about chicken at a summer festival.

Thoughts of a UK summer festival might conjure up images of lazy afternoons listening to bands and sipping cold beer. Or perhaps a rain-sodden morning after, trudging round a muddy field, desperately seeking coffee after a cold night in a badly erected tent. They probably don’t involve having a conversation about chicken and its pivotal position in the UK food system.

But that is exactly what I was doing at Green Man 2025 in Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons), leaving me and other festival goers heading home with food for thought and a homemade felt chick. We’d all be at the Chicken Exchange – a workshop hosted by the University of Southampton and its TRI-SoMe Chicken project partners, including FAI.

Positioned in the festival’s science zone ‘Einstein’s Garden’, in the hydrogen-powered Alchemy tent, we were one of several university groups offering research engagement activities for children and adults alike.

Our understanding of chicken

Premised on the idea everyone has some experience and understanding of chicken, we explored diverse perspectives on the provenance of chickens, the care of chickens for eggs and meat, their life and death and our eating or not eating of chicken.

At workshop tables, conversations often turned to the internal conflicts between our concern for animals and the need to source, cook and serve nutritious food for our families with competing pressures on our time, energy and budgets. Complexity was an ever-present and recurring theme.

Using craft as a facilitator

Occupying our hands with a simple craft project, sewing a felt chick or chicken nugget, adding eyes, beak, legs and wings before stuffing them with chicken feed, created space for open and non-provocative conversations among participants and facilitators.

As the chicks took shape, participants filled out passports, documenting their chick’s journey through the supply chain from farm to fork.

Complex relationships

Each conversation was different, shaped by the curiosity of participants and their own relationship with chicken as animals and as food. In the background, a video created by artist and project partner Dr Kathryn Ashill reminded us of that complex relationship.

Such public engagement activities have become vital to institutional research projects and are two-way in nature. They offer new ideas and experiences for participants and touchpoints for researchers to situate public sentiment on an issue and shape a project’s direction for positive impact.

Equal partners

The Chicken Exchange was grounded on three principles coined by Nancy Kline to encourage dialogue and reduce interruptions: 1) start giving attention, 2) stay interested in where each other’s thinking will go next, and 3) share the ‘stage’ equally. Rather than representing an audience for the receipt of information, participants became equal partners in the project, offering their unique insights and expertise.

It's rare for FAI to work directly with the public, and even more unusual to find us at a festival. But our experience at Green Man 2025 and the privilege of working within the TRI-SoMe team opens up new avenues for citizen engagement in driving better food systems for people, animals and planet.

TRI-SoMe Chicken (Towards Resilient Industrial Socio Metabolics of Chicken) is a collaboration led by the University of Southampton, with the Universities of Bristol and Gloucestershire, City University London and industry partners Applied Group and FAI.

A three-year project (2024-2027) funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (part of UKRI) and Defra, it is looking at how our modern, industrialised food system affects people, animals, microbes and the environment.

Instead of only focusing on what goes in and what comes out, it is considering the real-life experiences of those impacted. The project aims to develop a new set of ethical guidelines and tools to help the UK manage risks in its food system, making it fairer, more sustainable and resilient for the future.