From The Times and the Sunday Times, this is the story. I'm Luke Jones.

When going to a supermarket, a restaurant, going to the takeaway, would you know if yours was a happy chicken?

If you're interested in chicken welfare, then you want to recreate essentially the jungle.

You want to allow a bird to be a bird, a chicken to display its chickenness in the wild, inside a bar.

But also, there's increasing concern and attention on how fast your chicken was made to grow.

The difference between a fast-growing chicken and a slow-growing chicken is hard to tell if you're a layman.

If you went into a classic poultry farm and you went into one of the barns where they're raised.

You just see a carpet of feathers.

Very cute, fluffy little yellow things.

If they're just a day old, slightly noisier, bigger, less fluffy when they're a few weeks old.

But in many cases, the slow growing birds come alongside other higher welfare standards. So there might

be more light in the shed. There might be more things for the birds to play with, to perch on.

And that will involve mostly perches and hay bales and things like that.

Some supermarkets and restaurants have already pledged to only have the slower growing chicken, part of a new better chicken commitment.

But is it any better for the poor old birds?

What are the options?

And how did chicken, fried, roasted, grilled, whatever, come to rule the roost as the UK's

top meat? The story today? How to buy a happy chicken?

My name's Harry Wallop. I'm a freelance journalist. I'm a regular contributor to The Times.

And one of the things I specialize in is long features, analyzing consumer trends.

Well, we're talking about chickens today. And when you were looking into, first of all, the UK's obsession with chicken, you took a particular path, didn't you? Chicken shops. Why that?

I'm certainly not the first person to have spotted the proliferation of chicken shops on the

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