Like many people I watched the Fearnley-Whittingstall programme a few months ago about intensively farmed chickens and felt some measure of sympathy for the birds and revulsion at the conditions they are reared in. However, being someone who is not particularly well off I can appreciate that 2 chickens for £5 represents pretty good value and means that a family can eat meat that is at least unprocessed and reasonably healthy in terms of fat content.

Apparently Tesco shareholders, in spite of HFW's petitioning voted to continue meat production using intensive battery methods. This decision, I'm sure was taken with profitability in mind rather than concern for the needs of the less well off. Nevertheless it does mean that a fresh chicken is still affordable to people who have to live on a tight budget. I've always thought of myself as fair-minded and would say good luck to people whose income and circumstances afford them to make the ethical choice and buy free-range, organic meat.

I found the news of Tesco shareholders' decision in the Daily Mail in an article by Liz Jones. Rather than simply being an article about ethical choices it appears to be a middle class attack on the lifestyle choices of working class people:-

Saved from the hell of a battery cage, my beautiful speckled ‘girls’ | Mail Online

Below is an excerpt from the Liz Jones article:-

"In the midst of a new price war with rival Asda to keep down the cost of basic foodstuff, Tesco wheeled out the same old predictable, tired reasoning that there was no ‘demand’ from their customers for more ethical chicken and eggs.

Well, sod that. Why, when we can tell poor, working-class people not to smoke and not to drink, can we not legislate that they cannot oppress something lower down the scale than they are (ie farm animals), and that they should eat more healthily, thus taking the strain off the NHS?

Of course, those right-on people who work on the Guardian will complain that the British working class ‘can’t afford’ to buy free-range anything, but that is nonsense.

Meat, dairy products and ready meals are expensive, not just for the low-paid but for the planet – 30 per cent of the Earth’s land surface is used to produce livestock and a staggering one in three food grains is used to feed it, which means the really poor people (not those with DVD players, dishwashers and cars) are going without."

There may be some merits in the environmental and economic arguments regarding industrial scale food production but couched in such sneering, anti-working class language this has all the hallmarks of middle class prejudice imposing its will, once again on the less well off.