Factory chicken farming is about to get a roasting. If Jamie Oliver gets his way, the cheapest chicken will go the way of the Turkey Twizzler after his school dinners campaign. In a new one-off programme on Channel 4, Jamie’s Fowl Dinners, the chef champions the cause of chickens.
He will expose the reasons why the meat we eat more than any other costs so little and will show why we should all buy higher-welfare birds. “A chicken should never cost £3. I want the public to see the truth and I think they’ll make the right choices,” he says, talking exclusively to Body&Soul about his campaign.
When Asda knocked the price off a whole bird down to £2 last summer, the poor chicken’s value hit an all-time low. “This is screwing down prices on live animals,” Oliver says. “The supermarket price wars are to the detriment of the animals and the farmer.” He’s afraid that if we continue to insist on cheap chicken, Britain’s poultry industry will die a death as swift and ugly as that of the 16 million five-week-old broilers killed every week to be sold for the price of a pint.
Chickens are woodland creatures that like to scratch and roam outside, as well as to perch, play and shelter indoors. Yet free-range and organic chickens, which have grown up with grass underfoot, are a privileged minority – 95 per cent of Britain’s birds are fattened quickly in huge, overcrowded, windowless sheds. They’re a fast-growing breed, which reaches the right size for slaughter twice as quickly as factory-farmed chickens 30 years ago. “Many people call this the Frankenstein chicken,” Oliver says.
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