Supermarket boasts hard to swallow, says Fearnley-Whittingstall
‘Words like “traditional farm” and “farm fresh” give a subliminal reassurance that they’re good for the environment’
HUGH FEARNLEY-WHITTINGSTALL has backed calls for supermarkets to display the age an animal was killed on their meat packaging so shoppers are confident about farming practices.
The restaurateur, who just won a Michelin Green Star for cooking in an environmentally friendly way, told The Sunday Telegraph that supermarkets are being “irresponsible” using vague terms to make food look sustainable when it is factory-farmed.
He added: “I don’t think it’s appropriate for products or supermarkets or brands to use terms like ‘responsibly sourced’ or ‘sustainably sourced’, unless they can back it up.” Supermarkets including Tesco have made up fake farm names to market their meat, in order to make it look more appealing to consumers.
Fearnley-Whittingstall said: “I think the thing about words like ‘traditional farm’, ‘farm fresh’ and the made up names of farms, is that they give a subliminal reassurance to people that they’re buying something that’s kind of good for the environment.”
His head chef at the River Cottage, Gelf Alderson, thinks consumers should be told how old their meat is, as many factory farmed chickens are slaughtered after just a handful of months. And there should be a traffic light system on packets of food to show how environmentally-friendly it is. Fearnley-Whittingstall said he supports these measures.
“The traffic light system for fat and sugar is really effective because people understand the green and the red signs,” he said.
“If we could have something like that where there was actually a law for producers to state how old their meat is – that would be really helpful.”
After winning their Green Star, the pair said that they believe chefs in the future will be rewarded for the sustainability of the ingredients they use instead of extreme technical skill.
Fearnley-Whittingstall explained:
“20 years ago chefs were being rewarded essentially for their inventiveness and their sort of skill and their ability to manipulate ingredients into interesting looking beautifully presented dishes that obviously also have to taste great.
Many top chefs use “lazy ingredients” which taste good with very little work, such as wagyu beef, Mr Alderson added.
“All your work’s been done if you buy a piece of wagyu beef. All you have to do is cook it and it’ll taste good, that’s not hard.
“The best piece of meat we’ve ever cooked here was from a 15-year-old cow that had been on our farm and she’d had seven calves, you know she’d been around for ages. Cooking the shoulder or the brisket off that was probably my favourite meat in the last 10 years.
“But you have to work hard to make it nice. You actually had to use your skills as a chef to make that good,” he said.
The pair both eat and use meat, raising their own cows on the River Cottage land. However, they said they are cutting the meat down on their menu, outnumbering carnivorous options with vegan dishes.
Fearnley-Whittingstall explained: “I think being a vegan does make a very valuable contribution and I would preface everything we’ve said with that we all need to eat less meat.”