Meet your Meat

I just ate dinner (fish fingers luckily, given the following) while watching BBC’s Full On Food programme – it’s a kind of Richard and Judy with food for those who don’t know – rather twee. However today the presenter (a former “militant vegetarian” apparently) presented a piece on Meeting your Meat; he went to an organic farm, selected a steer, followed it to the abbetoir, witness it’s slaughter and processing and was given the sirloin steak to eat. He was unable to eat the meat that day but later ate some shin meat from the same animal on the show.

For a program on before 9 it seems rather adventurous – the few parts they omitted were the stunning of the animal with captive bolt, the action of slitting it’s throat, and a wide shot of jointing it. They did show the stunned animal being rolled out of the crush and the blood draining away after it’s neck was cut so it wasn’t glossed over at all.

At the begining of his presentation I did comment on how fluffy it was – he compared the steer to his dog etc. and had a very perplexed expression for the most part. However it was actually a very thought-provoking piece – putting the belief that you shouldn’t eat anything you aren’t prepared to kill into practice.

It is a false situation for us to be in though – when the choice is removed from us we do find it easier to kill and eat – my sister for example had to prepare her own fish from scratch for dinner when she was pretending to be in the Iron Age. If she hadn’t done so, she wouldn’t have eaten that evening. And she said it was the nicest fish she’d eaten. Seeing as we’re prepared to kill and eat when we will be hungry if we don’t, it seems somewhat supersilious to me to not eat meat when you don’t need to. My friend who is an ardent vegetarian I think would not eat meat even if she was starving, and I respect her for that. Vegetarians who eat fish for example… or who wear leather, or people who just don’t eat red meat but poultry is ok – I find that harder to appriciate. I don’t eat seafood – perhaps this makes me a hipocrite – I don’t feel seafood are humanly killed, whereas I feel red meat is. I haven’t decided about poultry yet. One thing I must stop is eating fish – I think they aren’t humanely killed and yet fish fingers are so easy to buy and cook. It’s very easy not to think about it.

The encouragement to think about the quality of the meat you eat is equally thought provoking – I do go to supermarkets and buy the cheap stuff, and I know full well I should be buying meat from known sources. Although there isn’t the moral implications there are with meat, the same is true of vegetables and other foods – I want to know where it’s come from and what’s happened to it. I wouldn’t eat food from my garden without being sure that no cat’s had had the chance to piss on it…

I can’t not eat meat – plants just aren’t the same, they don’t have the same kick and I know that makes me sound like a predator. I don’t *want* to not eat meat – I see the breeds we’ve developed as something important to continue – the old breeds were created because they were excellent for their purpose, and there are people out there who do the industry proud and raise good animals for meat in excellent conditions. There are likewise some very poor conditions animals are kept in. That’s my next step in sorting out life choices I think – where do I draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable, and how much work am I willing to put into working out which is which, and is it enough to warrant me continuing to eat meat?

So a very jumbled entry from me – I expect I’ll need to think about this a bit more. Probably should wait until after my exam though…

EDIT – the irritating thing is that the most thought-provoking, valuable, adventurous and volatile part of the program and it gets barely no mention on the website. In fact, the entire piece has been summed up in “Richard visites an abattoir”. Four words, and one of them is even spelt wrong.