Uruguay.
I can't really understand just why we became so fixated on meat. I know how and when we did, but the why still puzzles me.
When I was a child, we ate meat on Sundays and at celebrations. The leftovers were recycled into meals on Monday, Tuesday
and, in the case of a good fat chicken, through to the back end of the week, when chicken stock would form the basis for soups
and my mother's version of risotto. Nowadays, in the UK, we expect to eat meat every day, and our consumption has increased
five-fold in fifty years. Inthe last forty years America has increased its per capita consumption of meat from 80 kilos to 184 a year. European consumption
has risen from 56 to 89 kilos. If we go on increasing our consumption at the same rate, in the next fifty years we'll have
to produce five times as much again.
Our increased consumption of red meat has led to an increase in heart disease, certain cancers and obesity: our bodies just
weren't built to absorb such huge amounts of saturated fat. The consumer desire for skinless chicken and non-fatty cuts of
red meat means that the inevitable waste products are used for mass-produced food like turkey twizzlers, burgers and chicken
nuggets, which, as Jamie Oliver revealed in Jamie's School Dinners, are being dished up daily to our children. Some nuggets contain as little as 16 percent meat and much of that is waste skin.
The single, most astonishing fact for me in Oliver's series was that hospitals in Durham have had to set up special clinics
to deal with chronic constipation among children who sometimes don't go to the lavatory for up to six weeks. An excess of
sugar and salt in these products promotes behavioural disorders. Chicken flu, salmonella and e-coli all result from the dirty
and overcrowded conditions in which factory-farmed chickens are raised. A factory-farmed bird is allotted the space of an
A4 piece of paper in which to spend its entire, sorry little life. Force-fed from the day it hatches to slaughter in just
six weeks, its body weight increases faster than its bone strength, with the result that the chicken's legs give out and it
spends its brief life sitting in muck and dirty feathers.
As a nation we have a very strange relationship with meat: we make a big fuss about additives and the importance of good,
clear labelling on food products, but we never want to know how an animal has lived and died in order to get to our plates.
We are a nation of supposed animal lovers which has recently spent over fifteen parliamentary hours discussing whether or
not we should hunt foxes. I read a 2004 report from Churchill insurers which calculated that we spend an average of £5,000
on our dogs in the course of their lifetimes. Our two dogs, Bingo and Dylan, are very spoilt and overindulged, but I doubt
that we will spend a quarter of that on the two of them together; even so, if at all true, it is a startling statistic. As
a society we feel abhorrence when we hear of needless cruelty to animals and we stock the coffers of the RSPCA accordingly.
Yet we conveniently glaze over the details when it comes to the animals we eat.
When I'm standing next to our pigs, watching them go about their business, rooting and snuffling in the grass, I'm often reminded
of a story my aunt Val told me when I was a child. Val had a friend who kept pigs in her orchard in Buckinghamshire. Every
year, in the autumn, she'd take the three pigs, which she'd reared over the summer on her apples, kitchen leftovers, rejected
vegetables and generous helpings of full cream milk, to the local abattoir. They'd travel in a strawfilled trailer, towed
behind her car. It was a short, four-mile journey to the abattoir in Thame and, provided that she threw in a final bucket
of food, it always passed peacefully. But one year, just as she was rounding a bend, a car roared out of a side turning. She
skidded into the verge and the trailer ended up on its back
Kenneth Copeland, Gloria Copeland