The Big Food Fight Chicken rights or chicken price?

Date Published:

03/01/2008

What's more important to you, whether your chicken was reared ethically or the price at the till?

This month Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver will be revealing what goes on behind the scenes in the production of the nation's favourite meat in an aim to raise awareness of the conditions that 95% of the chickens farmed in the UK are raised in.

But what do you, the consumer think? Does the idea of intensive farming, where chickens have no more than an area the size of an A4 piece of paper to move around in, bother you?

Or do you think that this is a practical solution to producing affordable chicken for a large market?

When it comes to choosing a chicken at the supermarket, what motivates you? The ethical rearing of the bird you buy or the price it's going to cost when you get to the till?

The debate is already underway in the forum.

delilah-P:
"I have been a single parent and lived on a very small income but felt that the quality of the food I fed my children was very very important and was happy to cut back on other things to provide a good diet."

Hotcookie101:
"I have worked in a chicken factory, and been to a standard broiler house where (chickens) can't stand on their underdeveloped legs with their overdeveloped bodies. It's disgusting, but it's not really the farmers fault - they only make maybe a couple pence profit per bird (if they are lucky) due to supermarket targets and 'buy one get one free' offers"

Psychobabble:
"I don't buy any meat from the supermarkets anymore, I get my organic free range chicken from a local farmers market, the taste and texture is far superior to the 2 for a fiver pap they sell under the guise of chicken at the local supermarket."

loveggs
"If you care buy free range this week, next week, every week. If you do this you will clear the shelves and keep them clear. The supermarkets will respond by raising orders which will insentivise farmers to increase production. Only by creating a shortage of free range meat and eggs will there be any chance of feeding the money back into agriculture."

k~hearts:
"It's fine to buy all this nice food that is free-range and organic but it is too expensive for some people and they have to eat even though i hate the idea of animals not being free range."

soko
"I know it sounds bad but truth is that the majority of poorer people are not going to voluntarily buy a more expensive free-range product. The supermarkets need to stop driving prices down to offer us cheap products and then farmers would be able to engage in less intensive farming."

Rob2985
I am a farmer who is in the process of building a new free-range poultry unit here in the South West. If the consumer wants to buy cheap poultry meat it will have come from intensive broiler units and if this is taken away from British farmers then it will be produced in other countries creating more food miles with a product produced in conditions outside our control.
By showing this programme on TV what are you hoping to achieve, I assume stopping the people of this country from eating cheap intensively produced poultry meat and if you succeed you then put our farmers out of business."

EthH
: "Here you are stood in the supermarket debating should you pay 4 quid or 7 quid for your bit of chicken… Who in their right mind would take the 7 quid option if that’s all they have in their pocket? The kids are hungry, you’re down to your last bit of money, you can either spend the whole 7 quid on free range chicken or you can get mass produced for 4… which leaves you a whole 3 quid to buy those ‘healthy veg’ to go with it."

Have your say: Intensively farmed chicken - do you care? Let us know in the user comments below.

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