Free range

I have been watching "Chicken Run" on channel 4 this week and tonight I'll be watching Jamie Oliver's fowl dinners. It's all about the plight of the battery chicken and the short and brutal lives that they have so we can eat cheap meat.

I have often wondered if you can be a meat eater and also be concerned about the life that the meat you are eating had before it died. Does it matter that a chicken is able to wander free and is not over fed and abused before it dies? In my heart I'm a vegetarian but lack the will power to see it through into my life. That's a cop out but I have tried to give it up before and without success. My food was bland and lacking in something, so I caved in. I enjoy eating meat but it does concern me that the meat I eat has had a nice life before it is slaughtered.

On the programme, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall tried to convert his home town to free range. He was quite successful as he got a group of residents to raise some free range chickens and they were upset when the inevitable day came and they had to kill them. It's important that us meat eaters know the whole process from birth to death. But most of the locals were snotty about the idea of free range, moaning that they couldn't afford it. Yet they could afford to go to the pub every night, smoke and watch Sky TV. It's a question of priorities. We can afford to go free range, so from now on all of our meat will have led a half decent life.

What is also worrying is the strangle hold that supermarkets have over farmers, forcing them to use dodgy practices to produce cheap chicken. Unbelievably you can now buy 2 chickens for £5 from Tesco. That is ridiculously cheap. I don't shop in Tesco because I think it is bad in many many ways - now £1 in every £8 that is spent in the UK goes to Tesco. I hope that in my own small way I am helping the lives of some chicken somewhere.