The River Cottage Treatment
Sunday, 22 July 2007
I'm off to the Keswick Convention tomorrow with Witton, and have just spent a delightful hour updating my iPod so we can sing in the car as we drive through the Lake District. Ben interrupted to insist that I pay attention to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall as he took a group of ready-meal addicts to a slaughterhouse so they could watch lambs have their heads cut off and be hung from a hook, still twitching, to drip blood into a trough and have their coats torn from their skin. I eat meat as enthusiastically as the next person, and am very unsqueamish (I once helped to prepare and roast a whole pig, having transported it from the butcher in the boot of my car), but was reduced immediately to floods of tears, which I suspect was the reaction Hugh was looking for. In common with thousands of other busy online shoppers, I selfishly buy cheap meat week by week which has probably died the vilest of deaths, and give no thought at all to how it was treated when it was still alive. After drying my tears, I went to the River Cottage website, which is packed with helpful hints on the subject of free-range and organic shopping. Between that and our recent dinnertime conversation with Anne about how unethically most of the world's chocolate is produced, I think the Merricks' weekly shopping list will be looking a bit different from now on. And no, I won't be accepting substitutions, ASDA, thanks all the same, just in case you try to palm me off with a pack of SmartPrice chicken breasts. I know how they're produced now, and I'm on the verge of becoming a vegetarian as a result.
posted by fiona @ 18:09
