My family were reared in suburban Cork with a house big enough to have a chicken run, so we always enjoyed our own chickens and eggs.
The chickens were a Sunday treat, usually boiled , and eked out with some boiled ham or bacon and fairly inevitably served with a parsley or an egg sauce-and very delicious it was too.
I think it was only when my eldest sister came back from a stint as an au pair in the south of France that I realised how good a chicken which was roasted with just a sprinkle of olive oil (bought from the chemist) could be.

When cheap chickens came in the sixties and seventies I, like everyone embraced them. For an impoverished student the ability to buy a whole chicken, enough for four entire meals, for £0.19s. 6p (about €1.50 in today’s money) was cheap even then.
The fact that the residual flavour of fish from the birds needed copious amounts of curry powder to make them palatable was irrelevant, (they needed the curry powder, and the pineapple chunks which went with them, to make them tasty anyway)

It was after I married and we were on holidays in Italy that the transformation which had happened to chickens finally dawned on me.

We were in a rented house in Tuscany and went to the local market to buy lunch.
We bought a chicken and I stuffed it into the oven to roast.
After a while my wife came out to me in some concern, she said there was a strange smell from the oven, she was wondering if the chicken was “off ”
I went into the kitchen and was immediately carried back to our kitchen in Cork and the wonderful smell of fresh roasting chicken.
I was easily able to reassure Sile and we all thoroughly enjoyed the wonderful flavour of that Italian, slow grown, organic, free range chicken.
The whole process of moving from our own chickens to the battery ones had been sufficiently gradual that I had completely forgotten how good a real chicken could taste.
For years it was one of our great treats when hitting France to buy chicken in the markets and then roast them just with olive oil and whole cloves of garlic which we would squeeze like toothpaste over the chicken before eating.

These chickens were never cheap, not an everyday food but really appreciated when we bought them.

I never really thought too much about the rearing of battery birds so it wasn’t until I saw Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s “Chicken Out” series this month that I saw the appalling conditions in which the unfortunates were reared.
The trouble now is that having developed a conscience about one animal where is it going to stop. Pigs I gather have a fairly rough time being reared for the table, I have seen the Belgian method of raising their Bleu de Belge cattle and it is not a pretty site.
They say that lambs don’t respond to intensive farming methods and I have a feeling that ducks wouldn’t put up with 25 to a cage like the hens did.
I am beginning to think we need more information.
So Mr. Hugh F.W. after Chicken Run can we please have Pig Sty, Cow Byre……