Baked chicken with all the trimmings

As a small celebration - after last night's lively communal work leaving party - I'm cooking myself tonight a slap-up baked chicken with all the trimmings. (It has taken me years to get over my early journalism experience - of endless rubber chicken dinners with tinned peas, as served up by the "women's auxiliary" of whatever organisation was conducting the evening - but I can now almost face the idea of the dish again.)

The choice was made by the fact of the local Sainsbury having their "best quality" free-range chicken, from an identified farm, promising treed-pastures, at half price.

I'm increasingly trying to buy only meat from really decent sources, particularly regarding animal welfare. I saw some horrible things in my agricultural science days, but must admit that I've only really thought about them, and acted on those thought, in recent years.

So I was taken by this week's Times Literary Supplement article about Factory farm ethics - a review of several books, including Peter Singer's revised opus.

The wide-ranging history of human-animal relations - Hunters, Herders, Hamburgers:
The past and future of human-animal relationships by Richard W. Bulliet - sounds particularly interesting.