For a nation with a reputation for bad food, British cooking shows resonate with me far more than American ones. They seem to exist on a different planet from the chemical lab correctness of Martha Stewart (whom I also love, but for different reasons). In fact, Two Fat Ladies helped launch my interest in real cooking with traditional, whole food ingredients – and an extra helping of heavy cream. Their reruns remain my favorite cooking shows of all time. I especially like the episode where they take a break from cooking lunch so one of them can umpire a cricket game. But I digress.
Currently I enjoy Gordon Ramsay’s The F Word (which stands for “food”, naturally), on BBC America. He’s trying rescue English cooking one meal at a time and emphasizes the use of local, fresh food. In this, the second season, he’s trying to get English families to eat together at home, starting with a homemade Sunday lunch once a week. He’s also raising 2 Berkshire pigs in his backyard to help his kids understand the difference between pets and food, which is where it gets interesting.
His Berkshires live an idyllic life and to be honest, it seemed like Gordon Ramsay was escaping the harsh reality of life for most pigs… until the most recent episode, where he showed his viewers what the factory farming of pigs was all about.
A few interesting things. First of all, there was a advisory notice at the beginning of the segment on factory farming, noting that the were going to be scenes of a disturbing nature. The fact that we can’t show our children how we raise animals which become their bacon and Easter ham? Now that’s really disturbing.
Secondly, I’ve known about factory farming since my animal rights protest days in college and I still can’t watch this stuff. As soon as I see pigs crowded together with no air, no room to root and no tails… I just lose it. I’m embarrassed to tell you that I started to tear up and had to leave the room. I made my husband watch.
Thirdly, I was really surprised to see a posh cooking show full of celebrities take on factory farming. It’s easy to wax philosophic about organic farming, but it’s much more difficult, I think, to show that almost all the meat we eat comes from a system that’s (in my view at least), flat-out cruel.
And cost can't be ignored. Gordon said it cost about 35-40 quid a week to feed them and the entire experiment has cost about 2,500 pounds.
I hope that more chefs with visibility start addressing factory farming. For those of us trying to eat local, it can be a real challenge to find local, humanely-raised meat. I was a vegetarian for 10 years, but routinely ate conventional eggs. Now I eat meat, but it’s getting to the point where I eat almost vegan food when I eat in restaurants. Even if the restaurant features free-range chicken in the entrees, the eggs they use in omelettes and crème brulees are certainly not from free-range chickens. And laying hens are some of the most inhumanely treated animals in the factory farm system (which is saying something). At least I can buy eggs from my CSA and pork from my local rancher, and I have confidence in how they are raised.
How do you address the issue of factory farming?
