It's not surprising when you consider the atrocities carried out in chicken factories in order to get the chicken to your plate for the lowest possible cost.

Cheap does not always mean good value.

Anyone buying a chicken should look at the cost first of all. Don't know about typical US prices but here in the UK until recently you could famously buy two for £5.

Which means that from birth to shelf less than £1.70 ($2.80) had been spent on raising, feeding, housing, slaughtering, packaging, transporting and preserving that chicken. £1.70. Doesn't really inspire confidence in the way it was raised and the quality of the meat.

We've had something of a revolution here in the last few years and talking to people it sounds like it's begun in America (and other parts of the world too).

Taking part is simple. Step one is to accept that cheap chicken is an anomaly. Once it was considered something of a luxury.

Step two is to only buy chicken that you know was raised properly. This means outdoors, over a reasonable period of time. If in doubt, don't buy it.

Step three is to avoid all the chicken in fast food - KFC, McDonalds, etc. These people are usually the worst offenders and most people overlook the pre-prepared and the pre-packaged when looking for free-range, etc.

Step four is to cut out all factory chicken related products. Where did the egg in your mayonnaise come from?

It's sad but true that in Western culture morality plays very little part in the way things are run but it's easy enough to stop things through making sure that there's no money for the manufacturer in commiting this level of abuse.

I agree with the idea of demanding cleaner, and more humane conditions for our animals to be made into meat, but at least in America, where you'd think space would be cheap for factory farms, the economic model has dictated over the decades that growers maximize their output to the nth degree no matter the animal being raised for slaughter.

A report came out a few years ago (can't remember from where--heard about it from an interview with a scientist on NPR), that the surge of e. coli in beef (I know we're supposed to be talking about chickens, but the same principles apply) could be blamed on corn-feeding. "Corn-Fed" used to have a good connotation here. That time was the '70s.

But corn-feeding cows (and maybe chickens too), although it makes them mature into fathood faster, led to the cows producing way more stomach acid to process what they wouldn't naturally choose for food -- maize vs. grasses. The e. coli bacteria eventually evolved, and became resistant to highly-acidic stomach environments (like we have), and began infecting humans a ton more from the '80s on.

It comes down to space over here, oddly enough. The amount of food energy you can store in a silo of oily, fatty maize dwarfs the amount you can store in the same space with grasses. The troubling part, is they found that if you just switched each cow's diet back to grass 2 days before slaughter, problem solved.

But the factory farms can't even afford to do that, the tolerances of their economic models are so tight. We painted ourselves into a corner with this, from chicken to beef, to veggies, really.

So maize, which grows well here, and helped American settlers survive up till Industry took over farming, is coming back to haunt us with diseases, and trans-fats, and damage from obesity through high-fructose corn-syrup, and its solids. It's like a "food bubble" fed not by subprime loans, but pumping up our livestock with unnatural feed, and "Damn the consequences."

Thanks a lot, maize! I mean, "food industry!"

/possibly misinformed screed.

You'd be amazed what effect a little wallet voting can have.

I'm not claiming that we've reached a little meat producing utopia here yet, but we have taken great leaps forward and a lot of it is due to this campaign.

That focuses on chickens but since it started to gather momentum the face of meat sections has changed beyond recognition.

You can still buy the evil meat if you want to but there's less of it and the prices aren't as low as once they were.

Turns out we do have quite a lot of control over what the food producers and retailers do, they've just been reluctant to let us know it.

I guess I just think of what it would take to achieve similar results over here, and it just seems overwhelming, because of the difference of scale alone, and the difference in the political culture, really. I've seen a lot of fun being made of the whole northern "fried Mars Bar" culture on the chat shows over there, and I tend to think "Oh, you people have no idea...."

But maybe you're right. I've just learned the hard way not to underestimate the differences over here between the "edu-macated city folk," and "those who almost take a kind of perverse pride in junk infrastructure."

But it's like you live in a city, you get an education in all this kind of stuff, while you're young, and then initially assume the rest of the nation is there with you.

Then comes your first election after that, or your first trip back to "The Flyover States," and you get an object lesson in "Holy Sh*t, a fatty diet-based coronary is like a rite of passage in these here parts." Not really exaggerating too much there. You just learn to understand the massive extent to which the rural population's values control political discourse, as evidenced by the whole blue v. red state paradigm over the last 10 (really 65) years.

The politics here cover nearly every damned issue, including diet, and there's a real gulf between messages about healthy eating, and the addled idea that a bunch of "radical, elitist, citified Ivory-Tower socialists" are trying to end our practice of catapulting whole hogs into lakes of deep-fried batter," to wildly exaggerate.

Your body politic, overall has, might I say, a bit "healthier suspicion" of religion vis--vis science, and therefore more readily digests, to pun-xaggerate again, health news from science, and not see it as a personal affront to their sacred local businesses. Again, scale.

Ok, I'm really wasted, and any of the previous could be way off, but I will take your idea to heart, and hope we can rebuild our food infrastructure into something safe, sustainable, and truly nourishing and healthy, and find a way to convince people that God had something to do with it :)