Wednesday, January 23, 2008

The chicken or the egg?

Last week, we watched The Great Food Fight, Jamie's Fowl Dinners and all else as part of the Chicken Out campaign that Channel 4 ran. And we cried, and we felt sick, and we recorded part of it to show the children and as a family, we agreed that we'd go from being a predominantly free-range meat-eating family to never touching the battery-produced crap again.
And then we did the weekly supermarket shop, and tried to buy our customary large chicken (will last two meals, including a bowl of stock.) And we couldn't. Not a free-range one, anyhow. The shelves were overwhelmingly stocked with cheap battery-produced chickens, processed chicken products were everywhere we saw, and there wasn't a single decent bird in sight. In the end, we went to Waitrose and got a joint of beef instead but that's really not the same, is it?
I cannot believe that the supermarkets did not know that this campaign was coming, and that they consciously chose to restrict the consumer's access to free range birds- but sadly, that appears to be the case. Messrs Tesco, Sainsburys and Asda appear to want to keep the 3p birds on the shelf, even if their customers would rather pay twice the cost for an animal that's lived a little and eaten A wild oat- even only one.
Please, go to the website and sign yourself up.

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