Planet Chicken: The Shameful Story of the Bird on Your Plate
by Hattie Ellis
Sceptre, ₤14.99, 308 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤11.99

I once worked in a chicken processing factory. I saw diseased birds segmented and the good parts sent to fast food companies who sell them fried, in a box with chips. I saw the meat that ends up in the pre-prepared chicken curries we eat in front of the telly. I saw the drumsticks that are chilled and put in plastic trays for people to buy and take to barbecues.

The packages that contain this food rarely have pictures of live poultry on them. Instead we are presented with a field of wind-blown wheat, a tree or a smiling farmer. The connection we make is that the birds are reared outdoors in the countryside. That they roam around fields, and in and out of farm buildings, idly pecking at weeds and worms. Occasionally they flock to the yard to gobble up bits of seed scattered by the hand of a buxom wench.

Hattie Ellis, the author of Sweetness and Light, a history of the honeybee, shows that this is a lie in her new book, Planet Chicken. Poultry is raised in barns so packed that they have constantly to be ventilated or they will succumb to heat exhaustion. Many still die. We have engineered them to grow faster than nature intended - with even greater growth of their breasts. Their legs cannot withstand the weight of their overfed bodies. When they fall the others peck and trample them. The poultry industry calls the resulting carpet of dead chickens ”wastage”.

Farmed poultry is routinely given antibiotics and pesticides because they live in conditions that encourage the spread of disease. We consume these chemicals in their meat.

Planet Chicken is crammed with information like this. It is enough to make the most undiscerning carnivores want to change their ways. But the recounting of one horrific detail after another can be overwhelming, and individual examples eventually lose their power.

Other books have been written on the horrors of modern farming, but in the second half of this one Ellis offers us the opportunity to change things. She describes how consumer pressure resulted in the change from battery-farmed eggs to the free-range that most of us eat today. This model, she declares, could be used to change the way poultry is produced.

To this end we need to be prepared to spend more than three or four pounds on a chicken. If we use supermarkets, we should buy organic. Local markets sell birds that are delicious and have spent their lives outdoors. Such markets introduce us to an ethical network. We need to learn that the chicken on our table is the result of the sacrifice of an animal. Through this we can discover the true value of meat.

Ellis offers another solution to the factory farming crisis: the ”slow food” movement that has arisen in opposition to fast food.

Planet Chicken is reminiscent of the film (and book) Fast Food Nation, although Ellis’s work suffers in the comparison because she does not share

Eric Schlosser’s concern for the people who work in the factory farming world.

Still, Planet Chicken is readable, informative and scary. It shows that it’s time for us all to be concerned about both the lives of the chickens we farm for food, and the quality of meat they produce. Chickens are sentient animals - we shouldn’t let ourselves forget that.

Mark McNay’s debut novel ”Fresh” (published by Canongate) is set in a chicken processing plant.