by Jay Rayner
Oh, and it’s not very nice.
I know. I used to be a vegan. Not for long, mind, though it was for longer than I experienced poverty. It was just five days, to be precise. Oh God, how I suffered. Sometimes I still wake at night, the sweat-stained bed sheets clenched in my fists as I live and relive the memories. Forget the silence of the lambs; I am haunted by the silence of the Puy lentils.
Here’s what happened. One of my editors, who must have hated me, called me up and asked me to go vegan for two weeks. I haggled her down to one week, and then almost halfway through, drained and crotchety and tired of barking at my kids owing to the low levels of protein in my diet, I decided a week meant a working week. Five days. It was enough. I couldn’t go on. They could send me to report wars, make me the badminton correspondent, force me to report council meetings in Nuneaton. I was prepared to do absolutely anything for my newspaper. But I couldn’t take another day of veganism.
It was, to be fair, an intriguing experience (though I imagine having a limb amputated isn’t short on drama and distraction, but that doesn’t mean I’d recommend it). I was fascinated by the way a vegan agenda sent me rushing into the arms of non-Western food. I used up a lot of white miso paste and a lot of soy and chilli. And enormous volumes of noodles. It was a hugely carbohydrate-heavy diet. I felt bloated and uneasy on it, or at least more bloated and uneasy than I usually feel. I shared the pain of vegans, tripped up by unexpected outbreaks of milk powder in products that had no good reason to contain it. Why, in God’s name, is there milk powder in bags of flavoured nuts? Why? Nuts are meant to be the vegan’s friend, a reliable if relentless source of protein. The milk powder thing contaminated them.
For all the insights that my short flirtation with veganism gave me, it did nothing to dissuade me from the imperative of eating meat. After all, we have been doing it for a very, very long time. When anthropologists begin looking for evidence of human civilization at a dig one of the first give-away clues has always been animal bones, gnawed bare by heavy-browed early humans, probably by the fat little boys in the tribe who didn’t want to be mistaken any more for girls. In 2010 the celebrated anthropologist Richard Wrangham published a book, Catching Fire, which argued that it was cookery which made us human. Heating food makes it possible to extract the maximum amount of energy from ingredients. That meant our ancestors could waste less time foraging for stuff to keep them going and could instead concentrate on really cool things like inventing machinery, developing language, and becoming artists so they had something to talk about. Without the appliance of fire to food we really would still be hanging about in trees grooming each other for the protein in flies and lice. Wrangham’s argument is rigorous and compelling. You would have to be an A-grade, gold medal-winning, premier-league arse of mammoth proportions to dismiss it as bunk. The same argument applies to eating meat. It is a quick and efficient way to get the sort of nutrition and energy humans need to do the things we do, including all the stupid stuff like tweeting each other pictures of kittens. Without it a greater proportion of us would be dedicating vast amount of our lives to arable farming, to growing the things we need to substitute for the animals which are such a tight and clever nutritional package.
This was all brought home to me in the middle of the last decade when I was sent to interview Hugh Pennington, now Emeritus Professor of Bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen, who came to public prominence as a result of his investigation into the outbreak of E. Coli O157 in Lanarkshire in 1996 which killed seventeen people. He was the man who identified the causes of the BSE outbreak, and over the years he has become the oracle on all things food-poisoning related. In 2005 the Observer Food Monthly decided to give him their lifetime achievement award in recognition of the work he had done to make our food safer, and I had been sent along to profile him.
During the afternoon, by a crackling log fire in a central London hotel, we fell to talking about factory farming of fish but more particularly of chicken, which had been slated by many in the food world as a terrible evil, not least because it was a reservoir for infection. As many big-name chefs and food campaigners liked to tell us, factory-farmed flocks of chickens were often infected with salmonella and campylobacter, which could both have fatal consequences.
Professor Pennington acknowledged that this was so. Though, of course, he said, both of those could be dealt with by cooking the meat properly. So it’s not really an issue? He nodded and said he wanted to go further than that.
‘If you look over the twentieth century,’ he explained, ‘at the beginning lots of kids got diseases that we don’t see any more. There was lots of symptomatic tuberculosis, for example, because they were not eating an optimal diet. Things like cheap chicken have solved that problem.’ Of course, there is a downside, he said, including the spread of those bugs like campylobacter and mass-produced salmonella. ‘Though if you look at it brutally and over the long term it’s not a bad trade-off.’ In short, the benefits for public health of factory farming far outweigh the downside. In the short term we have come to blame the industrial food process for making so many of us in the developed world obese. We talk about over-supply of calories. We bemoan the over-use of sugars. All of these things are true. But sometimes the longer view is necessary. The fact is that the wide availability of cheap, factory-farmed animal protein has helped us to live longer. A lot of people may not like this fact. That doesn’t make it any less true.
This argument is, however, entirely from the human side of the equation. It’s about what is good for people, and I make no apologies for the fact that if you ask me which species I am going to side with in any argument, it’s more likely to be the people. Most of my best friends are people. But, as many have pointed out, that is not good enough because the eating of meat involves animals – sentient beings which have no one to speak for them other than those of us who eat them. So before we even get to questions of the sustainability of eating animals, and the whopping carbon footprint their rearing leaves behind, we do need to give them a place in the moral arguments, beyond that of object. We have to engage with them as things that live and then die.
Certainly I felt I had to. I know I can be horribly flippant about my meat eating, use it as a vehicle for crappy, mallet-heavy jokes. I don’t apologize for any of that. Lord save us from the self-regarding, self-appointed moral arbiter who claims they are thinking about the implications of every decision they take all the time. That’s not how we live our lives. That’s not how I live mine. Sometimes a chicken is just dinner and nothing else. Then again, that isn’t always good enough. Certainly it wasn’t for me. If I was going to think seriously about the role animals play in my diet I had to engage with the process that got them onto my plate. I had to go to work in an abattoir.
I had to get involved in the killing.
It is early on a Monday morning. I have been put to work on the pig tank and I’m trying hard to regulate my breathing to deal with the sensory overload. Danny and Alan, the two blokes I’m working with – and they are blokes; lean and hard-bodied and sinewy, with a clench-jawed sense of purpose – are getting on with it. They are doing the thing. They do this thing every day, sometimes for six or seven hours, and I can’t quite imagine how. For all the extra weight I carry I am fit, as a result of all those trips to the gym. I am probably fitter than I have ever been in my life, but I am genuinely afraid that this job on the pig tank will defeat me; that I will crumple at the knees and disgrace myself, overcome by the noise and the smell and the heat and the sheer relentless heft of it all.
I am intimidated.
The morning started for me not long after 6 a.m. and I had already thought it had been full on. I am in the abattoir of John Penny and Sons in Rawdon, that part of Leeds where it bows its head to the smudge of Bradford just over the hill. J. Penny is a rare business, an integrated beef farm, slaughterhouse and butcher’s, famed not just for sending some of the highest-quality meat to market, but for its complete openness. The slaughter
house industry in Britain – the world over – is notoriously secretive, and unsurprisingly so. Animal welfare campaigners can and have made the lives of those who work in it very difficult, and with good reason; the worst abuses of animals at the moment of death have generally been identified by exceptionally brave campaigners, who have made it their job to record the suffering – let’s call it torture, which is what it is – perpetrated by people to whom we have delegated power.
For that is the reality. We want to eat meat but we want to have no part in what obtaining that meat requires. We turn away from it. We ask others to perform that role for us, and we do not look. While the BSE crisis of the nineties vastly overhauled the regulation and oversight of abattoirs in Britain, they still remain very wary of any outside examination by the media. I have attempted to investigate various stories involving slaughterhouses over the years, but have been repeatedly warned by people with knowledge of the sector not to get involved.
‘There are a lot of dangerous people involved in that industry,’ one contact told me. ‘You’re a married man. You have kids. Don’t take the risks.’
The current Penny in charge of the business, John, believes in letting people in. He’s a big, solid Yorkshireman who keeps his hair buzz-cut short, as if to save time. ‘We have nothing to hide,’ he tells me. ‘Look at everything.’ The beef animals they raise travel only a matter of metres from the farm down the hill to slaughter, which reduces the levels of stress. They also slaughter for other farmers, but their livestock travel from pretty close by in Yorkshire. It’s also relatively small. In a month J. Penny will slaughter around 2,000 sheep, 6,000 pigs and 1,000 cattle. There are industrial-scale abattoirs in the US which kill 5,000 cattle in a day. There are records showing the Penny family have been farming around these parts since the end of the eighteenth century. Certainly they’ve been on this site since 1891, opening the first abattoir here in 1938.
But it is, as they like to joke, a dying trade. Once there were sixteen slaughterhouses in the area. Now only J. Penny’s remains, sustained because it diversified into wholesale butchery, turning the animals it kills not just into carcasses but into beautifully shaped, well-aged cuts of meat.
I have been here once before, for an article in which I followed a bullock from hoof to plate. I had gone to a farm in North Yorkshire with a butcher, to be taught what to look for in a live beef animal: the well-developed arse, the lump of fat where the tail meets the body, a lack of definition at the ribcage. I had been schooled in objectifying something with a pulse; to look at it as both a butcher and later a cook. We chose number 365, a thirteen-month-old Limousin chestnut cow, dark of eye, furry of coat. From there I had followed the animal to J. Penny, and had been standing above the ‘crush’, the metal cabinet designed to hold it in place, while it took the bolt to the forehead which rendered it unconscious. I had very briefly glimpsed the point when it was bled out. It was an educative day. It was dramatic and full on and left me thinking very seriously about the way we let others perform this task for us. It might have been easy for me to imagine I was playing God but I knew the reality was far more prosaic. The animals had been reared by farmers for the purpose of being killed and eaten. If I hadn’t chosen cow 365, it would still eventually be slaughtered. And if the likes of me hadn’t been here to eat it, this animal would never have existed in the first place.
But it occurred to me that, in bearing witness, I had failed to engage with the experience in an authentic manner. For the fact is that I was present for just minutes, rather than day after day as the slaughtermen are. To really understand what was going on, to understand the relationship between ourselves and our once-sentient dinner, I had to go for long-term exposure. I had to be there for long enough to be inured to what was happening around me. John Penny agreed that I could come back for a couple of days, that they would put me to work on whatever unskilled tasks there were.
And so early one morning in high summer I turn up at the site and am invited to follow a herd of sheep through what are called the ‘layers’, the shed of holding zones, separated out by clanking metal gates. As the gate in front opens to let through the flock, the one behind closes, in a continuous corridor that snakes back on itself as it rises up the gentle concrete incline, bringing the animals ever closer to the point of slaughter. Clive, a former butcher who now runs the slaughterhouse, leads me to a spot just above the chamber at the start of the ‘kill line’. There a young man by the name of Josh – ‘They call me the special one,’ he says with a grin, when we are introduced – would be using a pair of huge electrified paddles shaped like tongs to stun the sheep.
‘It’s only Josh’s mum who calls him the special one,’ Clive says, with a shake of the head.
The sheep are let into the room in tight batches of eight or so, a hatch clattering shut behind them as they come in. Josh positions himself with his legs either side of a sheep’s hind quarters. He presses the paddles to the side of the head and down they go, unconscious. Running over Josh’s head is a long continuous rail from which hangs a set of chains. He hooks one of these to the animal’s front leg and it’s immediately lifted up so that it is dangling, head to the ceiling.
It moves down the line to where an older man in a plastic apron is waiting, the sticking knife in his hand. Allan is coming up for 65 and retirement, after being here most of his working life. He is grey and solid and a little round at the belly, where the apron bows. He grabs hold of the sheep as it passes and shoves the blade in below the ear to sever the artery. There is a quick but contained spray of blood. The animal twitches. It is done.
‘The pigs twitch even more than the sheep,’ Clive tells me, as we stand there watching.
Josh stuns another sheep. ‘That’s a perfect stun, that is,’ Clive says. ‘Front legs out, back legs in.’
I ask Josh, who is in his twenties, ‘How long have you done this?’
‘It’s the only job I’ve ever done,’ he says.
‘Why?’
He shrugs. ‘They offered me the job.’
Clive says, ‘How many GCSEs have you got, Josh?’
‘None.’ Josh grins, then stuns another sheep and it passes onwards to Allan.
It occurs to me that this is an entirely male environment. There are a couple of women in the front office, but none here, where the killing is done.
I ask Josh if he would like to have some women in the workplace.
‘I wouldn’t mind,’ he says.
‘But they don’t apply for the jobs,’ says Clive. It is a place of men. This is how it has always been.
As we talk, the sheep keep coming through. Josh keeps stunning. Allan keeps sticking. I am staring down a white-painted corridor, its walls sprayed with some of the sheep’s blood. At the end, the rail turns, taking the dead sheep to a long line of men each with a different task: the sheep will be beheaded, skinned, disembowelled, the bodies sawn in half. All of those men are waiting. We can chat but the work must not be stopped. There are 700 sheep to come through here.
I ask Clive if they ever have to look carefully at the type of people they employ.
‘Of course,’ he says. ‘You get some. You see if they’re getting something out of the experience they shouldn’t.’ They are taken off the job. That said, he refuses to deny how the kill line can make you feel. ‘No mistake. It gives you a sense of power doing this. You see a big animal and realize how easy it is to put them down.’ He does not say this boastfully or with enthusiasm. He says it with the thoughtfulness of a man who has been in the trade all his life, who knows there are certain facts of life that must not be avoided. We stand and watch the sheep dying for around half an hour. It stops being quite as dramatic as it was at first. There is a rhythm. But it does not stop being compelling.
This is life, halted.
The sheep are through and it is time for the pigs. Clive invites me to work on the tank and I know I can’t decline. This is what I am here for. It is a tank of hot water – 62ºC – around twenty fe
et long, four feet deep and ten feet across. Behind the wall at our backs, in the kill-line corridor, the pigs are being stuck by Allan. I can hear the noise of them squealing and grunting in the holding area before they receive the stun from the electric paddles. I can hear the chains clanking. At one point I look around the wall and see the slaughterman. Our eyes meet. He is weary. With the sheep, Allan was merely a little splattered. Now he is drenched. He is covered in blood, from his ankles right up to the transparent visor of his face mask, though it is across his face too. It is everywhere, and the pigs continue to bleed out as they come round the corner, a huge, swirling scarlet tide. As they get to us, one of my colleagues lifts a handle which in turn lifts an articulated section of the overhead line. He can now lift the pigs up and over the lip of the tank so he can deposit them into the water with a huge splash. There is the smell of fresh blood and the tang of urine and shit and above the top of it all something familiar which I eventually identify as pork stock. Which is what happens when you dunk just-dead pigs in hot water.
When the pigs hit the water our job is to grab hold of the chains around their legs, three or four at a time, and hook the end over the side of the tank so the bodies aren’t lost to the depths. Then we must drag the animals down the length of the tank, heaving them against the fluid tension, straining to get them moving. Danny, who is working alongside me, is short and wiry and prefers to push the chains down; I prefer to use my weight to pull, but sometimes find my feet slipping on the wet concrete floor. Then again, I am trying to move around 300 kilos of pig at a time. Waiting at the end is the bristling machine. We push them through the water onto the platform – a little like the scoop at the front of a forklift – which raises them out of the water into an open-sided chamber. There they are flailed by furiously rotating rubber paddles with metal teeth at the end, which strip off any hair and, while they’re at it, toenails too. Every minute or so there is a searing burst of violent flame designed to finish the job. Finally they are spat out the other end, re-chained, and sent off down the line.