More sickening news from the food industry: supermarkets are backing a campaign to get us to eat home-reared veal. Otherwise, we’re just wasting the leftovers from the milk production industry – the bull calves. They’ll be killed anyway, or sent abroad to grow into beef, so why not eat them? Why not, indeed, if you must. But why not let them grow up here, rather than abroad? Why export them so that some foreign Johnny can make money from them, when our own farmers could be profiting instead? Anthony Gibson, director of communications for the National Farmers’ Union, thinks that that would make more sense. So do I, even though I am a sensitive vegetarian, but what has sense got to do with the meat industry? It’s been raving mad for decades.
We send our meat there, they send their meat here, we still transport calves in cramped conditions, although we know we shouldn’t. We don’t give a toss – whatever we want, we must have. We kill and dump our animals and import theirs; we throw ours away because the flesh isn’t white enough, or pink enough, or soft enough. And I thought we were meant to be cutting down on air miles, eating local and home-grown produce. We hardly eat mutton any more – it’s too tough, we can’t be fagged to stew anything. We haven’t really got the space or the crops to feed all the animals we’re breeding and throwing away, but it makes no difference. We carry on, same as usual, bugger the consequences.
We’ll try more or less anything: kangaroo, ostrich, monkey’s brains, dog, horse, foie gras, larks. And it’s all got to be cheap, so the rich and the poor can all have as much as they want, and no one who can afford organic or humanely reared food may criticise nasty production methods, because they are privileged snotters who have no right to tell the poor what to do. So on we go, gorging on anything that moves and takes our fancy, growing the billions of acres of crops to feed the millions of animals that we don’t even need to eat.
“Now we’re to eat more veal – as well as everything else that moves. I’m sick of this raving mad meat industry” by Michele Hanson.
