Meat

Above: Wards Butchers - I can recommend the sausages.


Health Secretary Andy Burnham has proposed reducing meat consumption in the United Kingdom by about a third, both as a way of helping the environment and as a health measure (countering the trend towards obesity). Almost immediately his office retracted the statement and denied he had said any such thing and that the media had misunderstood what he had really said (one imagines hysterical Thick Of It scenes in the Department of Health). Later Andy Burnham's office issued a denial that he was (or had ever been?) a vegetarian.



Above: prize winning cattle at a local show.


The proposal actually makes a lot of sense. Too many people are getting fat, and meat products are too cheap in this country (meaning poor animal welfare standards - most people would not eat meat if they could see the industrial ways in which the animals are kept and slaughtered). We need to pay more for meat, eat less of it, and give the animals a decent life.



Above: the Shoulder of Mutton pub - has a good range of ales.


Eating meat has been culturally important in the British Isles since prehistoric times. Sir James Frazer has collected many references to the way in which meat has been produced and consumed over teh centuries. Folklore records heroes who eat their meat roasted as opposed to marauding pirates who eat their meat raw; taboos and prohibitions about when raw meat can be touched; restrictions on how meat must be served (Saxon princesses require specific herbs with their roast lamb, and on no account must any bones appear on the plate).


The Thick Of It hysteria: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIgT7gVNLm0