Who gives a cluck about a broiler chicken?

Before the Second World War chicken was a relatively expensive meat, with the UK population eating less than a kilo per annum – compared to today's average of 23kg per person (1). After the war, as part of the government's concerted efforts to ensure the UK was self-sufficient in food and able to move away from postwar rationing (which lasted almost a decade after the war ended), the industrial-scale production of chicken began. Today, 93 per cent of the fresh chicken we purchase, most of it produced in the UK, is reared on factory farms.

The issue of how we produce chicken made the front page of last Friday's Independent thanks to a new series of shows on Channel 4. This week, the channel launched a season of campaigning programmes called 'The Big Food Fight', starring the channel's three superstar celebrity chefs: restaurateur and king of on-screen swearing, Gordon Ramsay; trendy lifestyle chef turned saviour of school meals, Jamie Oliver; and Eton-educated smallholder and killer of squirrels, bunnies and anything else that might make a good dinner, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

In the first strand of this campaigning season, Hugh's Chicken Run, Fearnley-Whittingstall launches his 'Chicken Out' campaign to persuade UK supermarkets to only stock free-range chicken, and to persuade us, the consumers, to stop buying factory-farmed birds. Fearnley-Whittingstall is hardly a friend of vegetarians; his previous exploits in his River Cottage programmes have enraged animal rights campaigners and the squeamish alike. Yet, in Chicken Run, his argument is that factory-farmed chickens suffer whereas free-range ones are happier because of the conditions in which they are kept; he has no problem with eating meat as long as the animals concerned live a 'natural' life.

Unsurprisingly blanked by the factory chicken farmers of the UK when he asks to visit their farms to demonstrate how cruel they are to their livestock, the River Cottage star decides to set up his own small-scale factory chicken farm, alongside a free-range farm for comparison, with both enterprises run to standard UK farming guidelines.