Page 10 - Hillside 2015 20th Anniversary Newsletter

Hillside Reveals What they want you to believe...
The Myth and the reality of life
2002 UK’s Worst Restaurant... and death for farm animals
behind the closed doors of the
We teamed up with the BBC to help make the programme factory farming system.
‘UK’s Worst Restaurants’. We randomly approached Indian and English
restaurants and easily found three restaurateurs willing to buy chicken and
lamb from our investigator who was posing as an unscrupulous seller. He told
the greedy owners that he killed the animals himself! Even after receiving the
‘UK’s Worst Restaurant’ trophy’ from Nick Knowles, takeaway owner, Mr Galal,
was still trying to contact our ‘supplier’ for cheap meat even though the BBC
had told him uninspected meat ‘wasn’t’ safe’! Mr Galal’s reckless behaviour was
described by a food safety consultant as ‘very worrying’. All the meat, was of
course, legally sourced by the BBC from Smithfield Market.

Exposing the Myths of
Welfare Standards...

In 2000, we had investigated Grampian Country Chickens. This ‘Freedom Food’
accredited farm was the nation’s largest chicken producer and had claimed to
be ‘absolutely committed to the highest standards of bird welfare’. We found
they were rearing birds for Tesco, Sainsbury’s and ASDA in absolute squalor.
As the big supermarkets had all claimed to be ‘shocked’ by our findings and had
said they would launch an ‘immediate investigation’ we decided to have another
look in 2002, to see if conditions for the birds had improved. Unfortunately we
found that nothing had changed at all! Our evidence, which was featured in
the Sunday Mirror and Sunday People, showed piles of stinking, maggot infested
carcasses outside. Inside, we filmed 22,000 chickens crammed into a dismal,
dimly lit shed where injured and distressed birds, many crippled with deformed
legs, were forced to use their wings to drag themselves to food and water.
TESCO had been so proud of this farm, run by Mr Pardon, that they featured
him on posters and put them up in stores around the country!

10