Celebrity chefs Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall have been ramming chickens down our necks for the past fortnight trying to change the habits of our capitalist culture obsessed with fast and cheap meat.
But welfare issues aside does it actually make a difference to the taste of a chicken if it spends its life cooped up in a crowded barn with no daylight or alternatively is able to spend its days ambling around a spacious, lush green field?
The Chronicle & Echo decided to put the matter to the test by cooking an organic free range chicken (priced £11.23 for 1.5 kg) and a cheap red tractor barn chicken (priced £2.50 for 1kg) which are the minimum standard.
The red tractor symbol mean that the birds live in windowless sheds for 40 days and have an area the size of a piece of A4 paper each.
Both chickens were seasoned and then cooked at Northampton College catering department, before being taste tested by a panel of students (see below).
Catering tutor Richard Curtis said many people may find it difficult to taste the difference because of the type of chicken they were used to eating. And he said the worse chickens were those imported from Poland and China which were full of water, rather than ones farmed in the UK.
He added: "The free range chicken is a tougher but tender meat, and more chewy. When you eat it it tastes better because you chew it. If you press a piece of barn chicken with your finger it will go straight through because it is so tender. With a free range one it is tougher. Your finger does go through it but not as easily because there is less water in it and more fat, as there should be."
The catering department uses chickens that are given 25 per cent more space, brighter light and objects to peck on to keep them stimulated.
Mr Curtis explained: "We won't use cheap chickens because of the poor husbandry. I have visited the local farms where we get our local meat from. We use barn chickens (above the minimum standard) because we get good quality meat but also good husbandry.
"If you go to a Michelin star restaurant and pay £20 for a chicken it will be free range. Adam Gray (a former student of Northampton College who works in Gary Rhodes restaurant 24) can tell you the farm it is from and when it was killed.
"If you are eating a piece of meat that costs you £1.50 with chips, common sense tells you the chicken will be very cheaply produced. You get what you pay for.
"The problem is we have got used to cheap meat. If we demanded something different the supermarkets would give it to us. But it also goes back to the second world war when afterwards we tried to make ourselves as self-sufficient as possible and so we intensively farmed."
But he said a total free range chicken nation was not a realistic solution to the current moral dilemma. A straw poll of five students revealed that they each ate chicken two or three times a week, putting a huge demand on the farming industry if it was representative of the whole population.
Mr Curtis said: "If everybody ate free range we would have to have chicken farms every 100 yards down the road. The country would be covered in them."

Watch our video taste test of a free range chicken and value chicken. See if our four tasters could tell the difference.