'A Freedom Food chicken yesterday.' Photograph: Andrew Forsyth/RSPCA
It was the most sensible utterance in a week of overboiled chicken shock - but in the end it was almost drowned out amongst the noisy, hasty TV theatre that went into making Jamie's Fowl Dinners.
If you followed Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Chicken Run on C4 throughout last week, you probably went away thinking there are two ways to buy chicken: the immoral choice of cheap, intensive indoor-reared; and the right-on free-range choice endorsed by Hugh but markedly more expensive. Right?
But there is a third way. It's "Freedom Food", as promoted and policed by the RSPCA and mentioned all too briefly on Jamie's Fowl Dinners on Friday. These chickens are a different breed from those raised by Hugh Doublename.
They are slow-reared indoors, with exposure to better light on a more natural light/dark cycle, fresh air, stimulation, and 25% more room to move around. They take longer to reach slaughtering age and certainly look healthier - their stocky legs can actually carry their meaty frames around; they don't just sit there being fat, stupid and turning into meat. Having met their fate, sitting there in cellophane on the supermarket shelf they glow yellow from their corn-rich diet.
And crucially, they can be bought for about a quid more than the pale and horrible intensively reared ones, and for much less than the free-range birds that it has been rightly pointed out many people simply cannot afford.
No, the RSPCA chickens don't wander outdoors during their upbringing, but when the indoor conditions are so good, a farmed chicken probably couldn't give a cluck. If you've ever kept chooks in any number (and yes, I have) you'll know that their pecking and foraging strips the earth bare, and it ends up a pretty miserable habitat. The sawdust floor and grain-feeding alternative seems much cleaner and healthier.
As the credits were about to roll on Fowl Dinners, Jamie blurted out his verdict that Freedom Food chickens are the way forward for the consumer. He should really have delivered that message much earlier in the show, and spent some time driving it home: "Buy RSPCA Freedom Food chickens. The yella fellas, my dahlin'." But in the end, this "here's what you can do to help" moment came across as little more than a throwaway line.
Instead, valuable airtime was spent on stunts like gassing unwanted battery chicks, confronting the audience with schlong-like tubular "long eggs" used for catering as well as tubs of industrial liquid "wet egg" that looked like pus. Or horrifying them by pointing out that the hotdogs you tuck into after a football match are made from mechanically recovered meat. (Did anyone seriously think saveloys contain the prime cuts? Of course they're made with lips and arseholes - in this case, "only the finest ingredients" means the finest setting on the mincer and the most anonymous paste possible.)
Partly, I think Jamie was hostage to the "factual theatre" format employed by the programme's makers, Firefly Productions. We could have done with much more of the factual, much less of the theatre.
At various times in my life I've done a fair bit of blood-and-guts work. I was born the son of a butcher, and I've worked in abattoirs (one for pigs, the other for battery hens), shot things, cut the throats of livestock, helped to make Spam. I've participated in the production of aforesaid mechanically recovered meat - I was the "floorboy" throwing the stripped chicken carcasses into a great big hopper with a giant corkscrew that ground and extruded them into red slop; or pushing a huge barrow of pork bones to a room known as the Protecon (Protein Conservation unit, from memory) where the marrow was hydraulically squished out.
And that's how I ended up appearing on another Firefly show - Kill It, Cook It, Eat It - which ran on BBC3 during what turned out to be a real blood-and-guts week across the networks. I think the programme Lenny and I went on - in which veal calves were slaughtered and butchered in front of an audience - fell down in a similar way to Fowl Dinners. It was quite disjointed, and too much of it involved the presenter strutting her stuff and trotting out her lines. The important messages got subsumed by the format. But overall it was a show worth making.
Anyway. After a week of chicken carnage, I reckon Hugh's message is hard to sell: buy an £8 raw free-range chicken in the supermarket (bypassing the hot, ready-cooked and cheaper ones riding the ferris wheel in the delicatessen) and then bugger around in the kitchen for days afterwards picking the last bits of meat off to strangle value for money out of the carcass.
Jamie's message, though ill-pitched on his show, is much more reasonable: spend an extra pound, compared with intensive-reared, on a chicken that's "had a life" and been raised in healthy conditions approved by the RSPCA.
So my verdict is in. Jamie is the chicken's champion. I'll be buying the yella fellas whenever I get the chance. Dahlin'.
