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THE RELUCTANT GOURMET

From pasture to plate

CELEBRITY BRITISH CHEF Jamie Oliver

Can you handle knowing where your meat comes from?

Honestly, I can’t. Blissful ignorance is so much more comfortable. However, in these times, when food scares are changing the way people live and eat, this information is vital.

In the cities it’s easy to believe that chicken comes in the shape of drumsticks, batter fried, golden and delicious. I know plenty of people who will happily eat meat, but can’t cook it themselves because seeing, and touching the raw product is too frightening.

Distance makes everything so much prettier. Meat rarely arrives in its natural form. Sausages, chicken nuggets, beef cutlets. Also, notice how the name of the meat often carefully distances you from the animal. You don’t eat a pig, you eat pork. Not cow, but beef. Not goat, but mutton.

That’s all changing. Now, around the world there’s a strong emphasis on knowing how the animals were reared and how they were killed. Tune into food programmes and you will often see travelling chefs and excitable presenters vying with each other to bring you astonishingly gory footage.

Celebrity British Chef Jamie Oliver was in the eye of a storm last year for killing a lamb by slitting its throat on television. His hands shook and he looked close to tears, but he did it anyway, and then said to what must have been scores of horrified viewers, “If that offends you, you shouldn’t eat it. A chef who has cooked 2000 sheep should kill at least one. Otherwise, you’re a fake.”

Influential food critic for Vogue, Jeffrey Steingarten was of the same opinion after a trip to Urt, in the Southwest of France, to watch and participate in what sounds like a rather gruesome, wholly traditional pig slaughter. In his book, ‘It must’ve been something I ate’ the chapter ‘It take a village to kill a pig,’ says, “…I felt a deep sadness and sense of shame. Doesn’t a pig, a chicken or a lobster die every day of the week for my dinner? Is there a difference between the deaths I witness and those I don’t?”

I met London-based food writer Richard Johnson, who is also an award-winning journalist and broadcaster, when he was filming ‘Kill it, Cook it, Eat it’ for the BBC. He spent a lot of that time in an abattoir in Manchester, shooting a programme that he said would “feature a live slaughtering every day, for a week.” Sounds macabre? He wrote a piece in London’s Telegraph in defence of the programme, saying “In a world where meat comes pre-packed, in plastic, ‘Kill It, Cook It, Eat It’ was designed to reconnect us with what we’re eating. It was filmed in an abattoir, but an abattoir with a difference — there was a restaurant built onto the end. It had windows installed, so that the diners could see what was going on... The diners witnessed the slaughter – and then ate the meat for their dinner.”

The place was Mettricks, an abattoir just outside Manchester, which he says is “a Best Practice abattoir, and animal welfare is a top priority. It’s small, so the slaughter men don’t rush the animals through like they’re on a production line, and the whole process is overseen by a vet from the Meat Hygiene Service. If you can’t cope with Mettricks, you shouldn’t be eating meat.”

Why should you care? Richard says there are farmers who feed pig fat back to their own pigs, cannibalising their animals. I wouldn’t be surprised if that happens with other animals too. So, this knowledge is vital to your health.

Besides there’s the issue of kindness. Of letting an animal die with dignity and as little pain as possible.

Most importantly, it’s about respect. The sooner you realise meat doesn’t just come dancing out of supermarket aisles, the sooner you will appreciate the price that has been paid for that sausage on your plate.

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