Today (Friday) ended what will probably, or hopefully, be the biggest thing to happen on the politics of food since Jamies School Dinners finished airing the first time around. This time he wasn't the sole orchestrator but once again had his hands in, literally at times, making this issue of food quality apparent for all to see. Jamie's Fowl Dinners aired for an hour and a half and focused completely on the lives of chicken for both meat and egg production. Most of us watching had no doubt seen all the facts before about meat production but to add the facts about egg production was enlightening and essential to round off the picture about welfare of chicken in this country. Channel 4 also, surreptitiously, managed to kick start the next half of their "food fight" season with a short documentary that was, perhaps unintentionally, hilariously covering the lifestyles of "raw" diet eaters.

The last two episodes of Hugh's Chicken run ended on Wednesday and brought about a very sobering atmosphere and feeling of true reality. The series ended with the man himself declaring that while the people of Axminster had made a great start in to accepting free range as the standard, there was still a huge way for their Chicken Out! campaign to go. It was encouraging to see how readily some people took to the challenge put before them, but this was unfortunately outweighed by peoples vindictiveness towards the "rich" and irrational use of excuses (see my blog post below)

I shall be blogging with my review of the final two episodes of "Hugh's Chicken Run" soon, however first I wanted to break this particular issue that has near infuriated me about people featured on the show. The issue I talk about is the absolutely bollocks stance of the "poor" that they "cannot afford" to change their food shop to introduce better quality and more ethical foods. The show itself centres on free range chicken (a product in current terms £2.08 more expensive per kilo than standard), but we could be talking here about ethical foods such as fair trade coffee and banana's, or even simply better quality meat with a better slaughter that you're more likely to find at a butchers.

Today (Monday) saw the start of what wasn't immediately apparent as a food campaign taking place on Channel 4. Tuning in for the "Big Food Fight" I assumed from the trailers, forgetting the modern C4 style, that we'd have some offbeat adventure cooking program with three of the top TV chef's this country has to offer. In reality the line up of programming is probably a whole lot less humorous but vastly more insightful. Starting off as it means to go on the next two nights following this one will continue the program "Hugh's Chicken Run" which tonight started the journey of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on his crusade to get people buying free range chickens.

Chickens were the first ever livestock that I raised at River Cottage. They've been giving me eggs and meat all my life, and now I rear my own, for both eggs and meat. And I think they're the front line of animal welfare in this country, and the way in which they're farmed is something to which the public are denied access. You've got chicken farms with barbed wire all around them, which is not necessary to keep the birds in. I particularly target the supermarkets because they sell so much cheap chicken - it's right at the heart of their price wars with each other, and they use it to try and gain market share.