by Jay Rayner
It is ninety minutes of pig drama, as scripted by Hieronymus Bosch. There’s the stench and the splash of the hot water and the drag of the pigs. There’s the roar of the machine and the heat of the belching flame. And over the top is the noise of the animals and the splatter and spray of the blood that cannot help but get you. Occasionally an animal comes round that is twitching and bucking more than the others and Danny takes a knife to them just to check they are properly gone, hunkering down under the gush of something hot and arterial to finish the job as quickly as possible.
And, of course, it is continuous.
I do what I can to keep up, to not be a hindrance. Occasionally I lose a pig to the water and somebody has to come to my aid to retrieve it from beneath the surface. I feel ashamed and literally unmanned. I am a writer. I sit at my desk. I type. I have never done anything that feels remotely male. That soft-cheeked 11-year-old, who looked like he had budding boobs, who was mistaken so often for a girl, is still in there trying to measure up. I feel I am failing. And then I feel ashamed, not for trying to measure myself in this way but for thinking like this when really what’s going on around me, the deaths of pigs to feed my own intense pork habit, is so much more important. Then there is the strain. I feel the effort in the core of my abdomen and in my arms and in my neck. I feel it everywhere. And when, after ninety minutes or so, Clive invites me to try my hand at something else, I grab the chance, reasoning that I have to do as much as possible while I am here. I leave Danny and Allan to it. I am happy to say goodbye.
The next day I go to work on the sheep kill line. My job is to help skin them. The line runs in a kind of U shape. They are stuck on the down stroke, come round the bend, and are beheaded and the skin loosened around the legs. When they get to me I am invited to punch my fists down between the skin and the still-warm, greasy body to loosen the skin further. Then I am shown how to grip the skin around the neck and yank hard. Get it right and it comes away in one long piece that ends up dangling around their arse end. The job will be finished by the next station in the line, after which they are disembowelled and the carcasses bisected, as with the pigs.
At first I am not bad at the skinning, even though I find the heat given out by the newly slaughtered sheep’s body disconcerting. But it’s all about tensile grip, and I simply don’t have it. My hands are not strong enough. I have other skills. I can type fast. I am a reasonably accomplished pianist. I have precision and dexterity, more of it than average, but I have no power, not like these men around me. I am soon taken off the job.
The sheep are finished. The kill line is cleaned down to make way for the seventy-five cattle which must now come through. Clive asks me if I would like a job, but very quickly I decline. When I first changed jobs on the kill lines I quickly realized that not all animals are the same. A sheep is not the same as a pig. Size changes things. Species changes things. This is brought home to me on the cattle kill line. The cattle are completely different. It is all just too big, too immense, too damn huge for me to identify any manner in which I could possibly participate. I watch the animals receiving the bolt to the head from the gun. The side of the crush goes up and they roll out senseless onto the abattoir floor, legs stiff. A chain is attached to a back ankle and close to a ton of animal is lifted high to the ceiling. It is sent round to the slaughterman, the only Muslim in the company, who is killing them in the halal style, by cutting their throats from ear to ear. He turns them towards the wall as he does this, so that the blood sprays out against it. There is an awful lot of blood in a beef animal. A huge amount of blood. The slaughterman does not flinch. This is what he does.
And that is what I am left with most of all: the sense of serious men doing a serious job. There is the little bloke whose task is to get under the beef animal as it is still bleeding out, stick his hand into the throat gash, find the oesophagus, and attach a clip which cuts it off so the contents of the bowel and stomach can’t be drawn back down by gravity. There are the men who take out the liver and lights, impaling them on a candelabra of spikes so they look like Christmas trees of viscera. There are the meat inspectors, men in their sixties whose word is law here; who, at the slightest sign of disease, can condemn a whole carcass and will not hesitate to do so. There are computerized traceability systems, operated with an extraordinary degree of precision by men who know that the entire functioning of the process depends upon them making sure that a link can be maintained between the beast that came in through the layers first thing and the carcass that hangs, cooling, in the vast walk-in fridges out the back. What happens here is important. It’s really important. And yet we treat its product with a shameful degree of casualness.
It’s a good word, ‘shameful’, especially where meat consumption is concerned. So many of us feel so many different kinds of shame about it. There are those who find all and any kinds of factory farming repugnant, regardless of what Professor Pennington might say about the value of cheaply available meat to human health. The chef and food writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall made a series of films about the way the cheapest chickens are raised, crammed together in sheds, their feet burning from the ammonia in their accumulated shit, their legs barely able to hold up the huge, Pamela Andersonesque tits they have been bred to grow. Understandably, he wept on camera. If he was looking for the truly ugly face of animal husbandry he certainly found it.
The highly regarded American novelist Jonathan Safran Foer wrote a book called Eating Animals, full of shock at the way so much meat in America is farmed (again understandably: in the US things like the tethering of sows in stalls – banned since 1997 in the UK and across Europe from 2013 – is still legal). Ever the philosophy major, he started from first principles, which is to say the regard in which we hold animals. The issue here, of course, is one of what some would call sentiment and others would call realism. Either you fully identify with animals as equals, who are therefore deserving of our complete protection, or you regard them as not equal, in which case – accepting their absolute right to be spared cruelty – it’s OK to eat them. It will come as no shock that I fall into the latter camp, and there was nothing in Safran Foer’s text to shift me over to the other side of the argument. He lurched from unsupported statement to unsupported statement, refusing to accept, for example, that certain animal behaviour is just instinct and therefore ascribing to it a higher intelligence.
In the way of the polarized arguments that infect the food world the opponents of intensive livestock farming always run in the other direction when asked for an alternative. The only solution, they say, is that everything should be free-range. Every chicken should be able to strut daintily across the pastures; all pigs should be outdoor-reared. They should be massaged with essential oils every day, bedded down on duck-feather duvets and slaughtered to the soothing tones of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Or something like that. I would be hard pushed to disagree. All animals should be reared like this. In a perfect world. The problem is that our world is horribly imperfect. It’s a dreadful place with many competing pressures, especially if you’re somebody’s dinner. According to Compassion in World Farming, Britain slaughtered 850 million chickens in 2011. Can you imagine how much space would be needed to allow all those chickens the ability to range free and far and wide? There simply isn’t enough land, unless you’re willing to move out of your lovely house and let a bunch of fat hens move in. The landscape would be nothing but chickens as far as the eye could see.
And by God would they be expensive. The £31 I paid for that chicken from Lidgate’s in Holland Park was obviously stupid. Insane. Barking. But what about the £15 chicken? Or the £18 chicken? Or the £22 chicken? Meat prices are already rising in response to feed costs, without us even attempting to set up animals with slabs of land to call their own. And as meat prices rise the willingness of people to grant them greater welfare falls away. In 2010 I interrogated shoppers in Croydon on just this point for a TV show. Almost all of them said at the start that they cared about animal welfare
. They loved animals. Adored them. Wished them only the best things in life and death. But when presented with the cost of meat reared to high standards they said they were not prepared to pay that much and would buy cheaper meat. What? Even if it meant lower welfare standards? Yes, they said. Even if it meant lower welfare standards.
Given a choice between their own well-being and that of the animals, they chose their own. It isn’t an unreasonable response. This is not to condone the very worst excesses of the industrial livestock rearing process; genuine cruelty should never be acceptable. But perfect practice should never get in the way of acceptable practice, if it means meat costs too much.
Certainly the joint of beef I presented those shoppers with was just too expensive. Indeed beef is a case in point. As I write it is the early autumn of 2012, and beef prices are going through the roof.
In fact they are rising so fast it’s worthy of a sweaty, panicky ‘stop press’ moment.
STOP! PLEASE! I CAN’T KEEP UP.
Newspaper articles of the sort I write week in week out are generally a snapshot in time. The comment piece of mine published in the Observer newspaper, ahead of the G8 meeting of the world’s wealthiest nations at Camp David in May 2012, was just such a snapshot. The intelligence coming from within international aid and charity circles was that US President Barack Obama was poised to announce a global food programme initiative to help deal with exactly the kind of chronic malnutrition in childhood that I had witnessed in Rwanda. Seize the moment, I bellowed, self-importantly. The world’s leaders needed to understand that we were teetering on the edge of another food price spike like the one that caused so much chaos and hardship in 2008. Quietly, almost unnoticed, the commodity prices for both soya beans and corn, the main livestock feeds, had spiked at close to the highs of the crisis four years before. At its peak in 2008 maize had cost $287 a tonne, or about $6 a bushel; in the spring of 2012 it was back around $280. Soya beans were trading at around $545 a tonne in Chicago, just shy of the historic high in July 2008 of $552. And that’s pretty much where the prices stood when I visited the Chicago pits a little over a month later, interviewing Scott Shellady and the other commodity traders.
Within days of my departure from America, farmers across the US began to report severe drought conditions. (I’m pretty sure these events weren’t related.) Crops were dying in the fields. Yields were drastically down. Words like ‘catastrophe’ and ‘disaster’ were being pressed into play, and for once it didn’t feel like hyperbole. By September 2012 corn was at $330 a tonne, or $8 a bushel. It had increased in price by over 30 per cent in just six weeks. Soya beans were at $672 a tonne. That, in turn, was having a massive impact on the price of beef, because soya beans and corn are what beef cattle are fed on. The beef shortage caused by the 2008 price spike, when cattle farmers decided feed was so expensive it made more sense to send their breeding herds to slaughter, was being compounded. So now, not only was there a shortage of beef animals. Those animals which remained were again hideously expensive to feed. The wholesale price for beef in Chicago had gone from just over $1 a pound to, at its peak, just shy of $2. Once again US beef farmers were liquidating their herds; they were now the smallest they had been since 1973. Cargill, which had told me that food security issues were ‘absolutely’ a business opportunity, was suddenly proving it by announcing that profits for the quarter of 2012 to the end of August were up 300 per cent from $236 million to $975 million. The last time it had revenues anything like that was during the food price crisis of 2007–8. Meanwhile the risk analysis company Maplecroft issued a Food Security Risk Index, which showed vast swaths of the world at risk of societal unrest owing to people not being able to access enough to eat. Countries like Ethiopia, Somalia and Chad were shown as at extreme risk, but even countries such as India, Libya, Iraq and Pakistan were in the high-risk category.
Here I was trying to write an incisive, thoughtful book about the coming food crisis, the tsunami of food price rises and shortages that was heading our way some time in the future, and the damn wave was already breaking over me as I typed. The crisis wasn’t some time in the future. It was here. Things like this can make life very tricky for a man with a book to write.
When you ask the ‘free-range or die’ lobby what people on low incomes are to do about the cost of non-intensively reared meat, they always come up with the same response: there are lots of cheaper cuts. And indeed there are. I’m a huge fan of cheap cuts. Give me skirt steak over fillet any time; it’s where the flavour is. It may require a bit more cooking but it’s worth it in the end. And I love offal; I adore those inner organs with their ripe, big-fisted tang of real animal that is so often missing from the more dainty and prime pieces. I love andouillette, that French sausage made from the business end of a pig’s intestine, which smells like a farmyard before it’s been cleaned of the shit. I love liver and kidneys and sweetbreads. Calves’ brains in browned butter are a thing of beauty. I firmly believe that if we are going to bang an animal on the head we have a moral responsibility to eat as much of it as possible, to suck the marrow from its bones and the cerebellum from its skull and work our way out from there.
But the notion that those on lower incomes should be banished to eating this and only this while the fat wallets get the sirloin and the ribeye makes me deeply uncomfortable. Too much of our modern food culture has already become a cocktail party for the chattering middle classes, in their Boden wrap dresses and mustard-coloured cords, from which a whole stratum of society is excluded; making that division real through brutal economics is surely not the way to go. We have to balance the demands of welfare against the economic imperatives.
But there’s another issue around our consumption of animals which makes all of these issues even more complicated: the fact that my meat habit is killing the planet and leaving people hungry. Obviously not just my meat habit. I mean, I like my dead pig and dead cow, but even I can’t be blamed for everything. It’s your meat habit too. And yours. And, while we’re at it, yours. The problem is multi-faceted. First, there is the volume of grain that could be fed to people which instead is fed to livestock. To produce a pound of chicken (live weight) it takes a little under two pounds of feed. It takes three pounds of feed to produce a pound of pork and a whole seven pounds to produce a pound of beef. If we are going to keep the coming nine billion fed we will have to give more of that grain to people and less of it to animals.
And then there is the impact all that livestock has on the planet. Globally the sector is accused, in a report by Cranfield University, of producing 37 per cent of all the world’s methane (which has twenty-three times the global warming potential of CO2). Sixty-five per cent of the nitrous oxide (N2O) released into the atmosphere (which has 296 times the global warming potential of CO2) comes from farm animal manure. More than 55 per cent of all agricultural emissions come from the meat and dairy sector. They use 70 per cent of all agricultural land and 30 per cent of the land surface of the planet. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization says it is the largest source of water pollution. The impact on biodiversity is also vast. Farmed animals account for 20 per cent of the total terrestrial animal biomass.
And you thought you were just having roast chicken for tea.
You aren’t. You’re serving up a weapon of mass destruction.
Naturally there are many who have argued that vegetarianism is the only way forward. It’s a nice idea. Even if you love pork belly and ribeye as much as I do, it makes a certain kind of sense. Get rid of all those farting, shitting cows and pigs so we stop poisoning the planet. Dig deeper, however, and it becomes clear that it’s neither completely desirable nor absolutely necessary. Swapping the entire planet’s agricultural production to arable farming will have impacts of its own, especially on water usage. It would also be bound to lead to an uplift in the sales of meat substitutes – awful things like Quorn, fashioned from dismal fungal growths – the production of which leave their own massive footprint. And there is another poi
nt. There are huge regions of the planet which are not suited to arable farming. Vast areas of upland Britain are really only good for the raising of ruminants; it’s impossible to plant crops on them. Likewise, you can’t feed people from the green hillsides of the Lake District, Wales or Scotland, but sheep bloody love the grass. The same applies to many other parts of the globe.
Farmer and former co-editor of The Ecologist magazine Simon Fairlie made exactly this point in his 2010 book Meat: A Benign Extravagance. Fairlie is no apologist for the livestock industry. He’d spent years living on a commune surrounded by vegans, and now lives at a centre ‘for sustainable living’ in Dorset. As a result of these experiences he had concluded that so many of the ingredients vegans used – chickpeas, lentils, rice, soya milk and olive oil – came with their own huge footprint. Furthermore, he said, the issue with livestock was the way it was being raised now, on grain, not the keeping of animals for meat per se. He calculated that by feeding cattle on the kind of straw and grasses that human beings could not eat, and pigs on residues and waste, we would need only reduce our consumption by half. He also pointed out that raising livestock is good for the environment. ‘Livestock provide the biodiversity that trees on their own cannot provide,’ he wrote in Permaculture magazine. ‘They are the best means we have of keeping wide areas clear and open to solar energy and wind energy. They harness biomass that would otherwise be inaccessible, and recycle waste that would otherwise be a disposal problem. And they are the main means we have of ensuring that the phosphate which leaks out from our arable land into the wider environment, and that is crucial for agricultural yields, is brought back into the food chain.’ He also challenged authoritatively all the figures for both water consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.