Not least because of recent television programmes, many of us now understand how most chickens - and eggs - are produced. The first half of this book rehearses the shocking truths: ever cheaper birds squashed together in sheds, sitting on their own faeces, force-fed antibiotics and coccidiostats, rife with the signs of stress and suffering.

Ellis adds many less well-known, but no less disturbing, facts, such as that “the percentage of fat on a chicken carcass has risen from 2 per cent to 22 per cent over the 30 year period during which our chickens have been ‘improved'”. It is salutary to be reminded that chicken nuggets usually contain “slurry produced when the carcass is pushed through a sieve and turned into malleable protein pulp”. The efficiency of chicken farming is almost miraculous, but vile.

Ellis then turns, in equally crisp prose, to the solutions. She undertook a “chicken trail” looking at best and worst practices all over the world. “Higher welfare” birds are, Ellis argues, the least that we should move towards, and fully free-range birds would be the optimum. That may be naive because of the cost. And while Ellis clearly loves talking to producers of free-range chickens, it is a pity that she doesn't address the supermarkets and their customers. For our own health, let alone the chickens', we should pay three or four times more for a free-range or barn-reared bird. The rich are starting to. But will the poor?

Planet Chicken, The Shameful Story of the Bird on Your Plate, by Hattie Ellis
Sceptre, £7.99

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