It might seem perverse on a budget food website to suggest you shouldn’t buy the cheapest food available but sometimes the price is just too high as you’ll see for yourself if you watch Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Hugh’s Chicken Run for the next three nights on Channel 4.

The series shows the celebrity chef and food writer setting up his own intensive chicken farm to show just how inhumane the conditions are in which 95% of the poultry in this country is raised. Standard chickens are grown from newly hatched chick to oven-ready bird in just 39 days during which they live in such crowded conditions they can barely move.

Fearnley-Whittingstall - supported by fellow celebrity chef Jamie Oliver - wants to stop the supermarket price-wars that encourage this inhumane treatment . If you want to support him sign up to his campaign on www.chickenout.tv

You can also do your bit by boycotting the cut-price offers the supermarkets have on sale and buying only free-range birds. If you feel you can’t afford them think again. If you use chicken thriftily, adding lots of extra veggies rather than having seconds of meat and using the carcass to make stock for a soup or pilau as described here and here you can easily stretch a bird to two, or even three meals.

Consumer pressure has largely stopped supermakets stocking cut-price eggs. Use your buying power to make sure they stop promoting cruelly-reared, cut-price chicken.

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