ANYONE FOR chicken or eggs? Now that Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall have shone Channel 4's spotlight into the sordid recesses of the broiler shed and the battery cage, you might think that the products of these intensive systems would be deleted from our shopping list promptly while we trade up for more ethically produced alternatives.

But the last time Channel 4 had a significant go at factory-farmed poultry - a two-part Dispatches in 2005 - it didn't appear to dent Britain's taste for cheap chicken one little bit. It featured Raymond Blanc, splicing open the feeble, spongiform leg bones of top-heavy, intensively reared birds, and the authoritative professor Michael Crawford testifying to the worryingly high levels of fat in their flesh caused by their rearing methods. And what happened ? Sales of chicken actually rose by 19.6% in the two weeks following the broadcast. How come? The supermarkets ran a series of special cut-price offers to offset any impact the programmes might have had on sales. Far from ditching intensive for free-range or organic birds, many people saw the attractive price as just another incentive to feed their seemingly insatiable appetite for meat from miserable birds.

I don't see the latest celebrity chef campaign yielding any better results. The current round of public breast-beating on factory-farmed poultry provokes a sense of déja vu. If Britain really was concerned enough to support more progressive farming methods with its purse, then we would have seen an improvement in animal welfare by now.

Back in 1996, when I reported on the foul and unsanitary conditions in which most of our birds are reared in my book The Food We Eat, this was new to consumers but already familiar, well-documented territory for animal welfare campaigners. In the intervening decade, similar "revelations" have become a staple for broadsheets, tabloids and every consumer magazine under the sun. So, if we really wanted to hear the message and act on it, then we would have done so by now.

You might argue that TV and the cult of celebrity has the power to effect change that eludes dedicated campaigners. There is scarcely a title in the non-fiction books bestseller lists that is not a TV tie-in. Clearly, Jamie, Hugh, Gordon, Nigella et al exert a powerful pull on our wallets (along with Clarkson, Titchmarsh, Oz and that mob), albeit the money spent may well go on buying their books, rather than stumping up for the more humane products they recommend. Wasn't Jamie recently bewailing how school meals are still, in the main, crap, despite his school dinners campaign? So much for the ability of the celebrity chef to change the way we eat.

As for our supermarkets, they are past masters at damage limitation. You can't pick up a paper or visit the poultry counter in your supermarket at the moment without seeing reassuring statements about each chain's wholesome sourcing policy. Corporate affairs departments have been busy at work, crafting statements such as "our chickens are sold with legs on to show that they do not have hock burns", or guaranteeing that "our chickens are housed in naturally ventilated barns" and similar. These offer just enough random, technical data to lead consumers to believe that they can continue stocking up on cheap poultry without a pang of guilt. Expect a raft of free in-store recipe leaflets for chicken soon too, funded by poultry producers, naturally, who are already screwed down by supermarkets on price.

Grim footage of intensive poultry rearing makes excellent telly for the grey, post-festive, detox season, but if we really want to improve the conditions in which the overwhelming majority of birds are kept, then certain key things have to happen. The British government could call in Europe for the abolition of the broiler system where a meat bird is reared entirely indoors, in little over a month. The broiler shed stinks, literally and metaphorically. We need a concerted move to ban it. This is hard, but not impossible to achieve. Europe has agreed to ban the battery cage for egg- laying hens from 2012. Many said it would never happen.

Our food retailers need to put their money where their mouths are with an instant and substantial increase in what they pay poultry producers. Once again, there is a precedent. After years when dairy farmers had to sell their milk for less than the cost of production, all the supermarkets have now followed Waitrose and Marks & Spencer's lead and hiked up what they pay for milk. Unless poultry producers are paid better, they cannot afford to improve animal welfare.

Consumers must appreciate that any presumed entitlement to cheap-as-chips poultry protein is morally and environmentally unsustainable. We must retrench and resume thinking as we used to, seeing chicken as an occasional, not inexpensive treat, a scarce resource, savouring it hot then cold, utilising the carcass for stock, and wasting nothing.

The days of cheap poultry are over anyway. Drought and flood caused by climate change is sending feed and oil costs soaring. If it is going to be fit to eat, then chicken must cost more and we must have less of it.