As rival celebrity chefs, they are more used to taking potshots at each other. But now Channel 4’s culinary “three tenors” – Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall – are joining forces for a campaigning season which will “challenge the people of Britain to think before they eat”.
C4’s Food Season, which will air in January, will include Oliver following up his quest for healthy school dinners by trying to persuade big supermarkets to improve the “hideous realities of industrial chicken production”. Oliver will reveal to his guests some of the “hideous” ways chicken-related dishes make their way from farm to fork through a series of “shocking demonstrations”.
In Chicken Run, a three-part series, Fearnley-Whittingstall challenges all the major supermarkets to change their ways. To show the public “what happens to chickens that are sold for less than the price of a pint of beer”, the River Cottage chef sets up his own intensive-rearing chicken farm near his home in Axminster, Devon. He will be shown breaking down in tears at the plight of the unnaturally large 39-day-old broiler chicks, crying: “I can’t kill another chicken.”
Gordon Ramsay will attempt to get the entire country cooking at the same time with his show, Cook-a-Long-a-Gordon Live.
