ChickenOut

Hugh is a writer, broadcaster and campaigner. Hugh started living in the original River Cottage in rural Dorset in 1998, determined to start growing and rearing some of his own food. His experience was documented in the Escape to River Cottage series (1999).

Since then Hugh has hosted his own series of food programmes named River Cottage sharing his passion for good food and animal welfare.

At the start of 2008, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, along with fellow chefs Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay, was featured in Channel 4's Big Food Fight season. Hugh filmed Chicken Run for the series, in which he created three chicken farms (one intensive, one commercial free range, and a community farm project staffed by volunteers) in Axminster, near River Cottage HQ.

This series culminated in the "Chicken Out!" campaign to encourage the promotion of free-range chicken and an end to intensive chicken farming.

He is a permanent team captain on a food-based panel game, The Big Food Fight ‘quiz’ on Channel 4 and Hugh’s new cook book, River Cottage Every Day, was launched on the 5th October 2009. The book shows how Hugh’s ‘back to basics’ approach to food can be adapted to suit any busy family or working person.

A message from Hugh:

I feel so strongly about our chickens that I launched Chicken Out! to campaign for better chicken welfare.

I believe that the conditions in which most UK chickens are reared are unacceptable. I would like to see the industry 'de-intensify' by lowering stocking densities, using slower growing chickens and including environmental enrichment programmes in all chicken sheds.

Supermarkets and fast food outlets should adopt these higher welfare systems as their new baseline standard, and should in turn insist that all their suppliers adopt them. Above all, I would like to see more birds reared outdoors, on assured free range and organic systems. I believe this is the natural and appropriate way for a chicken to live.

I need you to register your support on this website. We need thousands of signatures to convince supermarkets, farmers, government regulators and anyone else involved in this unacceptable business that this must change.