When two companies at opposite ends of the food market decide in one week that they have to be treat their food better, it sure starts to look like a trend. Last week, it was Wolfgang Puck who decided to use meat and eggs that met strict animal welfare codes.

His top executives professed themselves happy about the deal. "Wolf feels he needs to step up now to make a difference, and he has the star power to do it,'' Kaplan said. "We're behind it 110 percent," they told the Review-Journal's Norm Clarke. Puck's chain has given up the foie gras and is 70 percent "organic."

And now, reports the New York Times, Burger King will gradually move to getting all its eggs and pork from suppliers that don't confine animals in cages and crates. Free-range chickens and pigs raised in crates big enough to move around are in short supply, especially for a big outfit like BK, so they are starting with 10 percent of supply and will work up to 100 percent of supply.

Both the Humane Society and PETA, which has been running a campaign for decades to bring humanitarian standards to animal raising and slaughter, said they were pleased by the new arrangement. It's a big move for mainstream food companies that have made their fortunes on industrial farming to acknowledge that there might well be a marketing edge in assuring diners that their food was raised in minimally humane standards.

An animal scientist who sits on corporate committees advising on animal issues, says that this move will put pressure on suppliers and other retailers to get with the program.

If they don't, these PETA clips on chickens and pigs pretty much speak for themselves. Skeptics will still say PETA and its allies have run a very clever marketing campaign to sell a delusion, or the restaurant chains are conceding that PETA was right all along about factory farming.