It’s been a big, big week for chickens in Britain. Launching Channel 4’s month of food-politics programming (after several months of holiday indulgence programming) is feisty sparkplug and local-foods advocate Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. His three-part series Chicken Run aims to get half of the citizens in his local town, Axminster, to buy free-range chicken. It’s a tall order, given that only 5% of them currently do so.

That figure mirrors the general rate of free-range chicken consumption in Britain, a country in which the following stupefying statistics are true:

• 24 million chickens are killed every 24 hours
• The average Brit eats 50 pounds of chicken a year
• 95% of the 850 million chickens reared yearly in the UK are intensively farmed.

Needless to stay, statistics are similar in America. We consume more of the unfortunate creatures—87 pounds per person per year—and the reputation of our factories is…well, no better.

Fearnley-Whittingstall put the program together after realizing that half of Britain now buys free-range eggs, thanks to a campaign lasting nearly forty years. Exposing the broiler chicken industry, he figured, might convince people to spend a few extra quid on free-range meat, too.

His way of proving the point was raising two flocks of chickens: one, in an allotment on a low-income housing estate in Axminster, whose residents were “enthusiastic cheap chicken buyers”; the other flock a mini facility built for intensive chicken production, with 2,500 chickens reared according to industry standards: each with less space than a piece of A4 paper per unit, with the light turned up high enough to keep the animals continually eating and resting, eating and resting, but low enough to avoid cannibalism. Predictably, conditions are horrifying. Whilst culling the poor beasts in the shed one day, Fearnley-Whittingstall breaks down and cries, sniffling “I really don’t want to kill another chicken this morning.”

The British have been moved, and it ain’t over yet (Jamie Oliver comes on later this month with his own take on battery chicken farming). Sales of free-range chicken are way up, at least in Axminster; by the last episode in the series, 60% of the town was buying free-range.

Programs like this demonstrate the power of the media in changing consumption habits, and we desperately need our own Hugh here. Who’ll step up to the plate?

p.s. A word of caution about the term “free-range.” In Britain, the label “free-range” actually legislates that the chickens spend time outside, unlike the loose U.S. label “free-range,” which just indicates that the chicken shed has a door somewhere, leading to the outside, which may or may not be open.