Can’t stand the meat?
Time for Millennial cooks to get their hands dirty
The millennials have struck again. Not content with hectoring us to go vegan, such is the squeamishness of the entitled, still-livingwith-their-parents generation that those who do deign to eat meat are apparently refusing to actually handle it. And thus comes the news that supermarket Sainsbury’s is to unveil a new kind of packaging. The novel pouches – known as doypacks – will enable consumers to add pieces of meat, fish or poultry into a frying pan without the need to touch them. So a millennial can simply hold the offending package at arms’ length, doubtless grimacing at the mere sight of the flesh, and then – as they say in the trade – “rip and tip”.
Katherine Hall, product development manager for meat, fish and poultry at Sainsbury’s, was unequivocal in her reasoning for this apparent innovation. “Customers, particularly younger ones, are quite scared of touching raw meat,” she said. According to her research, millennials have been eating out in restaurants and so are not preparing as much food at home. “If they are not used to it, they may think, ‘Ugh! I’d prefer someone else to do it for me’,” she added.
For a lover of food – and that doesn’t just mean eating, but taking an interest in the whole story of an ingredient, be it lamb or carrot – this is of course depressing. I suppose I’m glad there were no millennials lurking around my house a few months back when I dragged a dying deer across the fields and down to the back yard. The young beast had leapt out of a hedge while I was on a walk with my dog Cyrus, a highly trained and not at all scary fox red labrador. The animal had run across a field and then, out of view, had injured itself in an attempt to jump a fence into the wood. I found it lying on the ground, alive but badly wounded.
So I took some string from my pocket, tied its two legs together and dragged it home. Back in the yard I dispatched it (cutting its neck), drained the blood into a bucket and then butchered it into haunches, legs and fillet of venison. Using the freezer to store it, I cooked up the bits at various points in the ensuing weeks.
Similarly, at this time of year, you can see whole carcasses of milk-fed lamb being delivered to the door of Marianne Lumb, chef patron of the exquisite 14-seater restaurant Marianne in Notting Hill. “We will then butcher it down,” she says. “I’m a butcher’s daughter and I actually think that, if you’re going to eat meat you should probably kill it once in a while.” Lumb admits some frustration when a customer recently asked for “meat, but without the bones”. “If that’s your attitude then why eat meat in the first place?”
Placing plastic between the customer and a piece of meat is nothing new of course, but it perpetuates our distance – both physically and mentally from the product. The cook, writer and TV presenter Hugh Fearnley-whittingstall caused a few raised eyebrows back in 2004 when he published The River Cottage Meat Book, which was considerably more than a recipe book based on his Channel 4 River Cottage series.
He illustrated an early chapter in the book with a sequence of rather gruesome photographs of a pair of his North Devon beef cattle being taken to slaughter, defending them by writing that “it seems fair to both sides of the debate”. He wanted to remind carnivores that “there is no meat without the death of a warm-blooded sentient animal… and at the same time to ask vegetarians to consider at just what point of the slaughter process that cruelty and suffering are taking place… How exactly would they prefer these animals to die, given that immortality is not an option?”
One of Fearnley-whittingstall’s protégés is James Whetlor, a lover of meat – particularly if it’s goat (the subject of his latest book). He has young children – too young to be squeamish millennials – who, he says, rather relish the spectacle when he brings home half a hogget or half a pig to butcher. “They love the gruesome nature of it,” he says. “They love to give it a poke and then ask questions about it.”
And it’s those questions, according to Whetlor, that are so important. “If you don’t touch meat, if there is packaging then you become further and further removed from the reality of the animal. And the further removed you become, the more detached you are and the less likely you are to care,” he says. “If you care then you are interested in the welfare of the animal. These days they don’t teach cooking in schools and a friend of mine told me that one of his kids did have a lesson recently, but it was how to make a ham sandwich.”
It’s enough to make revered chef Michel Roux Snr – founder of the three Michelin-starred Waterside Inn in Berkshire – mad with fury. “I’m really cross about it,” he tells me. “It’s just rubbish. If you don’t want to touch meat then why bother cooking it? These kids’ brains have been boiled.”
It was brains, of course, that chef
Fergus Henderson was boiling, or broiling or braising, when he came to the fore with his restaurant St John and his nose-to-tail eating philosophy in the Nineties. Henderson didn’t just relish touching his meat, he pretty much embraced it. From a romantic dinner for two of a slow-roasted pig’s head (an eye peering at your lover amid the juices and watercress leaves) to a kids’ supper of deep-fried pig’s tail, he engendered an almost feverish love of meat. He had and still has an unsqueamish delight in devouring every part of a beast: “If you kill an animal, you should eat all of it,” he once told Vanity Fair adding: “It’s only polite.”
His version of politeness has millennials recoiling and reaching for their date and almond vegan breakfast bar. To them, perhaps, this flesh and blood is all too unclean. Yet it’s this cleanliness that worries chef Henry
Harris, lauded for his French restaurant Racine and now at the helm of a small chain of pubs including The Coach in London’s Clerkenwell.
“It’s important to touch meat and even be exposed to some bacteria,” he explains. But he also fears a more cynical ploy. “The more food is processed and packaged, the more supermarkets can charge.”
Perhaps it’s not all the fault of the poor millennials. After all, they’ve been brought up in an era of over-protective mollycoddling. As the acclaimed food writer and cookery teacher Rose Prince argues: “The way that our over-cautious health authorities go on about meat you’d think you were handling lethal weapons or unexploded bombs.”
This obsession with the food safety of warnings and sell-by dates has made us forget how to trust our own instincts, she feels.
It’s time to persuade the millennial in your life to get down and dirty. They don’t have to witness the slaughter of beef cattle at the local abattoir, just get them to hold, touch and smell a nice juicy steak. If they can appreciate its texture, they’re bound to cook it better. But if that’s beyond them, perhaps you could point them to a Youtube video on how to dissect an avocado.