Where does meat come from?

I was watching one of those terrible TV programs where has-been celebrities, or in many cases never-were celebrities participate in a cooking program that sees them make fools of themselves gradual being sacked either by the chef in charge of the kitchen or at a later date by the watching audience.

In one scene the chef, who was very particular about the freshness of the food he served showed the remaining contestants how to kill and prepare an eel for cooking. He then instructed them to go out side and capture their own eel and prepare it for that evening’s meal.

From the reaction of several of the so called celebrities you would have thought he had asked them to commit first degree murder – one girl was even heard to call it inhuman....

After several minutes of watching them try to capture, kill and then prepare the eels we went to the interviews that were with the individual celebrities.

Now I have heard some rubbish in my time on the TV but what came next was unbelievable

One celebrity in all seriousness said that she had never considered where meat came from – she thought it just came from the supermarkets where it was neatly packaged on plastic trays and was now considering going vegetarian if it meant something had to die so she could have meat.

Do these people come from the real world or are we just being suckered in to some neat TV crap....?

Unfortunately having mentioned this to a few people down the local pub one person was also amazed to discover that meat did not always come on neat plastic trays with plastic covering.

I remember as a child going to the local butcher and watch him cut off exactly the amount of meat we wanted from a larger joint. A few years later aged 8 I learnt how to pluck and gut pheasants and pigeon and the following year to prepare rabbits including skinning and quartering them.

Now I may admit that I might not have had the same childhood as many people having learnt these skills but what is the world coming to when grown adults do not know where their foodstuff is coming from? How do they know which the best cuts are, whether the meat looks fresh, how to prepare it and how to serve them?

I have come to the conclusion that people living in the west are slowly but surely being indoctrinated in to what is acceptable to eat but where will it all end?

There are sci-fi books that depict a future where there is not enough food for the number of humans alive so mankind is re-graded by a controlling faction and lesser humans are bred as cattle and eaten in the same way. The “meat” is butchered on secret farms and then presented in shops in easy to cook portions.

Now we are a long way from that at the moment but now is the time to take back the knowledge of where our meat comes from and how it is prepared.

Visit your local butcher and ask for exactly what you want and learn more about the different regional varieties of beef, lamb, pork and chicken and then experiment with more exotic meats from your home country or overseas.

Who knows by discovering something new that you like you may be encouraged to visit the country or region that it comes from.

Happy eating