ETHICAL EATS

It was chicken breast fillet portions that finally tipped the balance. It was late, we had nothing for dinner so I nipped into a supermarket and grabbed the first chicken I saw. When we got home I started to prepare it and was shocked. The fillets were huge. I mean really massive. The chickens must have been the size of turkeys and as the average age of a chicken at slaughter is six weeks the way they are bred and fed is, to me, verging on the nightmarish.

I understand why: money. More profitability and lower cost to the consumer, it is that simple. We have a choice. Free range is better – those birds get a whole extra 14 days – but free range doesn’t mean eight weeks of pecking round a rural idyll. And it is expensive, something like three times the cost of an intensively reared bird and more still if it is organic.

But we have a third choice: don’t