At Sunday lunch in Tisbury, Wiltshire, a few weeks ago. Two chickens came out of the oven. One was carved in a trice for the children, then my hostess flung its feeble frame, all pallid, pinkish joints, into the bin. I leapt up to retrieve it, bleating about stock, but she stayed me.

“Don’t bother,” she said. “It’s only a two-quid chicken from the supermarket. We weren’t going to tell you, but we want to see whether you really can tell the difference between a £2 chicken and one that costs a tenner.”

I subsided, queasy at the news that the children were eating the bird that lived in a space the size of a sheet of A4, standing in its own faeces in the dark, like about 850m others every year.

“If people knew how the average chicken was treated before it ended up as their Sunday roast, they would probably be disgusted,” the RSPCA says. As my daughter would say, euw. I am disgusted.

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I hope the RSPCA and two of our most committed campaigners for better food, Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who are both airing television programmes about the horrors of battery farming, will soon put an end to this cheap-as-chicks consumer culture, in which we spend less on our food than on our leisure, and a smaller proportion of our household income on food than any country in Europe.

As for the £10 bird we also ate that day, well, it was bought from the local butcher, from a local farmer, and was plump, tasty and all that the other bird was not. I’m sure it had had a wonderful life. I’m not worried about her. But I am worried about the farmer who raised her, and all those who try to practise good husbandry in the rural economy and who bring the products of their continuous care and back-breaking work to our table, because I don’t think they are getting many breaks either.

Rosie Boycott, the former editor and journalist, is one of many who have become horrified by the prospect of the independent retailers and producers being obliterated en masse by the out-of-town supermarkets, by the long-term decline in net farm income from its 1995 peak and by the rise in sales of farms. Like many others, she wanted to stick her own finger in the dyke and do something. But she soon found that the economics of food production – even with higher commodity prices – are bleeding awful.

In her book about setting up a farm near Ilminster, called Our Farm (which is a direct echo of an even grittier tale of agricultural travails, The Farm by Richard Benson), Boycott sets out the balance sheet of trying to run a smallholding.

In the first year of operation her monthly costs were £2,329 (feeds, wages, fertiliser, petrol, insurance, etc) and her set-up costs were £60,000. After about 15 months, by supplying greengrocers and householders, she had earned a grand total of just £1,544.80.

“I am continually taken aback by how much hard work goes into making just small amounts of money,” says Boycott, who admits that she can earn 50 quid by appearing for a few minutes on a radio show. Take eggs. Eggs start with £1 chicks a day old and go on to need heat lamps, a secure chicken run, inoculation, inspection, washing, storing and certification, not just on each box but on each egg. “It still seems incredibly tough that going through that exhaustive process still nets you only 80 quid (for 750 eggs),” she confesses.

Now all this makes one think that the thing to do is to forget being a good farmer, producing real food for nice people, and simply supply the supermarkets and be part of the problem. But even those who have made deals with the supermarkets are struggling.

On a nearby Somerset potato farm, for example, one third of the crop is chucked away (too bumpy, blotchy or misshapen for today’s consumer), which means that each acre of land yields 12 tons of sellable crop, or £1,236. But direct costs add up to £815 per acre. With margins so slim, even the farmer with a fat contract with Tesco has to sell industrial quantities of anything to make a living.

But it’s meat that matters, not potatoes, when it comes to animal welfare and global warming and human health, with Amazon rainforests being cleared for crops largely to feed the cows of North America, and a rise in protein-fuelled cancers endemic among our obese, overfed populations. So the solution should be easy, really.

As the food campaigners and animal charities say, we should boycott all the meat products of those who do not look after their animals, and the supermarkets that sell them so cheaply, and be prepared to spend more money on well hung, well bred animals (and I’m not talking about Jamie and Hugh now). We must change the way we shop and eat so that meat is a treat again, once a week, rather than an everyday filler.

Then, and only then, can those poultry carcasses from Sunday lunch make chicken soup for the soul.

When I saw the headline, “Bank exec sacked after making Shi’ite joke”, I almost didn’t read on because I knew it would make me want to leave the country.

I couldn’t resist, though, so let’s all now pause to recall the case of Marc Howells, 42, of Barclaycard. Well, he was with that company until he compared his latest quarterly figures to Muslims and said that “some were good, some were Shi’ite”.

Apparently, some colleagues laughed like drains, as we do when the boss makes a side-splittingly unfunny crack. But others knew that, just as in Honecker’s East Berlin or the Third Reich or Stalinist Russia, Howells would be for the chop if anyone reported that he had spoken out of turn.

And so it was that he was drummed out for daring to make a tired old pun and also for being ripe for culling, one suspects. “Once word got round and a complaint was made,” one cockcroach-like colleague crowed, “he was toast.”

In other words, this is a country in which not only those who disparage but those who could be construed as disparaging a nonwestern culture can lose their jobs. This means that we all lose the freedom to voice anything jokey or disrespectful of any minority, even if the minority in question isn’t present to hear it but some quisling is.

Meanwhile, one would be tempted to go on, imams are preaching hatred against Jews and homosexuals in our own mosques and madrasahs – but of course we aren’t allowed to talk about that in case we upset the sort of person who thinks nothing of murdering his own sister, or blowing himself up, because either his honour or the prophet has been insulted. Hey ho.

Anyway, Howells was not merely the victim of this peculiar cultural Marxism and generalised terror of Muslim extremism. He also had to suffer because of the infinite wimpiness of those who run things and take decisions and the mean-spiritedness of those he worked with. I’m not sure which is worse.

rachel.johnson@sunday-times.co.uk

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