And so we’re back to the chickens. Old time readers know this is a favourite theme and if you look back in the May Archives you’ll see why.

Today Jamie Oliver, top TV chef geezer and friend of Jimmy of Jimmy’s Farm, (who incidentally was in my class at university), has today slated the top supermarket chains, i.e (lets name them shall we, yes lets,) Tescos, Sainsburies, Asda, Morrisons, Waitrose and Marks and Spencer, for being utterly spineless and pulling out of meetings he had scheduled to talk about factory farming. Too chicken shit scared to come and answer to the camera then?

I guess the big chains want to keep the general public in the dark, and feed them on shit, kind of similar to a battery chicken.

So any way it seems there are two more chicken champions on board.

The question is this, are the big supermarket chains that sell all these nastily raised sufferation filled animals responsible for the welfare of those animals?

Should they be?

This is going to be an exercise in getting the general public to open their eyes.

I have just watched Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s (he of kill your own animals and eat all the bits at river cottage), programme “Hugh’s Chicken Run” in which he is running, quite literally side by side, a battery farm and free range farm to compare the welfare and results of the birds in each.

Jamie Oliver is set to follow this up on Friday with “Jamie’s Fowl Dinners”.

We watch with interest.