There's nothing that Jamie Oliver likes more than a good campaign – the campaign for better school dinners, the campaign to train the disadvantaged to be chefs, the campaign for titting around advertising Sainsbury's surrounded by elves.
But they're all old-hat, because Jamie Oliver wants to campaign for something more raw, something more visceral, something that'll frighten the general British public into never eating ever again. That's right – Jamie Oliver is going head-to-head with the battery-farmed chicken industry. In a one-off Channel 4 show – Jamie's Fowl Dinners – to be broadcast next year, Jamie Oliver is promising to graphically demonstrate the battery-farmed chicken's rearing process. Fingers crossed this will involve Jamie Oliver being shut in a tiny, airless, artificially-lit box for the rest of his life where he'll be forced to breath his own shit-fumes until a farmer cuts off his nose and mouth.
We don't know about you, but it'd certainly be the only way we'd learn.
Now that Delia Smith's back in the cookery business, all the other TV chefs have had to raise their game sharpish. Already, a fear-stricken Nigella Lawson has announced that all her shows from now on will be presented in her bra and pants, but just about every other TV chef on the planet has decided to go down the social-consciousness route in order to get the public to eat better food instead.
Next year Channel 4 is launching a Food Season, where all of its chefs stop joking around for long enough to deliver very serious lectures about how eating Pot Noodles from time to time makes us all worse than Hitler. Gordon Ramsay is making Cook-a-Long-a-Gordon, a live show where he'll cook some food and you'll all cook it along with him at home. Plus that creepy autopsy man is doing a show where he'll chop open a dead fat person's guts and crawl around inside them going "Urgh! Isn't he fat?"
If that's not enough, there's also going to be another show all about north-Pakistani Shimshal cuisine – one of the healthiest on Earth – which seems to have the exclusive purpose of making obnoxious Islington mothers screech "Well actually I only fill Noah's school lunchbox with mud oven-baked dildongi now," whenever they're around their equally hateful friends.
But the star attraction of Channel 4's Food Season will be Jamie's Fowl Dinners presented by Jamie Oliver and Hugh's Chicken Run presented by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, both designed to make us realise that intensive chicken farming isn't the five-star dream holiday for chickens that literally none of us assume it to be. In the latter show, Fearnley-Whittingstall will try to create his own intensive chicken farm before, we're promised, bursting into tears at the humanity of it all.
But it's Jamie's Fowl Dinners that's got everyone excited, because Jamie Oliver loves a good campaign. Who can forget when Jamie Oliver tried to destroy childhood obesity by making schools only sell dinners that kids would rather starve to death than eat? Or when Jamie Oliver went to Italy to campaign for, um, pasta? Or something?
And Jamie's Fowl Dinners looks set to be Jamie Oliver's most shocking campaign yet, because in it he'll research battery-farming methods and then cook a gala dinner that demonstrates all the awful things that happens to chickens during it. And there's more – the gala dinner is for famous people, and you know that something's important when Martine McCutcheon wrinkles her nose at it, don't you. Channel 4's head of factual entertainment Andrew Mackenzie said:
"Jamie's simple message, in quite an overt way, will be, 'If you know what happens to a chicken before arriving on your plate, would you change the way you think about chicken. Would you still eat it?' Our standards are not as good as some in Europe. Even people who buy free-range chickens may not be aware that every time they eat cake, the eggs aren't likely to be free range, so they are essentially endorsing the battery hen."
Needless to say, a 9pm Channel 4 season about ethical farming practises fronted by Jamie Oliver is probably only going to attract the kind of smug, Smeg-owning, middle-class Jemimas who'd rather shit fire into their child's mouth than let it anywhere near a Monster Munch, while all the other fat lards watch Trinny And Susannah Destroy The Nation's Self-Esteem on ITV instead.
This is how it will be, because this is how it's always been. But while this fat-mouthed, self-satisfied, holier-than-thou sermonising couldn't be more annoying if Jamie Oliver personally jabbed you in the eye with his finger every other word, you can't deny that Jamie Oliver is doing something. And at least as celebrity campaigns go, it's a few hundred notches down the mental scale than endorsing rat milk to the world.
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