Posted: January 3rd, 2008 - 9:13pm by Doug Powell

Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall (left, not exactly as pictured), two of Britain's top celebrity chefs, are launching a campaign get consumers to eat more welfare friendly reared chicken by revealing some of the welfare issues in poultry production.

ThePoultrySite reports that on January 11, Jamie Oliver will host a gala dinner to demonstrate the reality of how chickens live and die.

The program is part the Big Food Fight, a season of programming that aims to raise awareness and encourage debate about food production, animal welfare and healthy eating.

That's great. I eagerly await the day Jamie and other celebrity chefs pay attention to their own food safety habits. A 2004 paper we published based on 60 hours of detailed viewing of television cooking shows -- including Jamie Oliver's - found that an unsafe food handling practice occurred about every four minutes, and that for every safe food handling practice observed, we observed 13 unsafe practices. The most common errors were inadequate hand washing and cross-contamination between raw and ready-to-eat foods.

Guess we can't expect much of U.K. celebrity chefs when the best their own, taxpayer funded food safety group can come up with in terms of advice is cook your holiday bird until it's piping hot.

Jamie, Hugh, let's see you stick it in.

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