Jamie Oliver has made sure Channel 4 gets some free publicity for the beginning of its Food Season, starting tonight at 9pm, by lambasting Sainsbury’s - the company that pays him £1.2m a year to front its food campaigns.
Oliver laid into his golden goose, after the supermarket avoided taking part in a public debate about the welfare of battery farmed chickens, despite being asked by Oliver himself.
The TV chef also asked bosses of the country’s other three main supermarkets, Tesco, Asda and Morrisons to take part. But they did not show up.
Oliver told the Daily Mirror:
“It is shocking that the people I work for didn’t turn up on the day. I don’t know why."The fact that your PR department hasn’t got the confidence to turn up and talk about what you do for the millions of people who come through your doors each week. Of course the supermarkets should have turned up. How dare they not?”
The media furore certainly won’t do Channel 4’s month-long Food Fight season, which features three of the country’s best known chefs- Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall- any harm.
The series, which kicks off tonight with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s ‘Chicken Run’, ‘aims to raise awareness and encourage debate about food production, animal welfare and healthy eating’.
Tonight sees Fearnley-Whittingstall investigating life inside an intensive chicken farm, and claiming the birds are “at the frontline of animal welfare in this country". Currently farmers only make a couple of pence for each bird sold to the supermarkets, due to price wars that go on between the main players.
Non-free range and cheaply sold birds live a ‘life’ of gluttony and sloth in order to grow to their saleable size in half the normal time - forty days instead of eighty. Only two to three per cent of chicken consumed in the UK is free range as opposed to 30-40% in France.
With Oliver continuing in his new role as saviour to the under-privileged and Ramsay using his foul mouth and considerable cooking talents to entertain the nation the series promises to be undoubtedly entertaining.
Whether or not posh-toff Fearnley-Whittingstall can convince the masses - already struggling to make ends meet - to part with more of their hard-earned cash for a chicken, remains to be seen.
By Gemma Sharkey
