Making our meat first choice must be a priority

British Beef Week has just come to an end. Bridgwater and West Somerset Conservative MP Ian Liddell-Grainger tells Defra Secretary George Eustice he must have blinked and missed it

DEAR George, I caught the faint sounds of a fanfare at the beginning of it but I have to confess British Beef Week has hardly made much of an impact.

The problem is, I suspect, that impacts are more and more difficult to achieve when barely a week or a day goes by now without the nation being urged to ‘celebrate’ something or other in the food and drink line.

I note at least 30 ‘fun food holidays’ are officially listed this year when the populace is encouraged to celebrate (and presumably consume large amounts of) traditional classics of the English gastronomic repertoire from pizza (February 9) and absinthe (March 5) to mac and cheese (July 14) and queso (September 20).

Alongside which plain old beef just sounds, well, rather underwhelming and frankly not that exciting. Of course I understand that a lot of the thrust was directed at the trade, particularly those eyeing up export markets. But before we even think about exports shouldn’t we really be targeting the domestic market first?

Statistics tell me that in 2019 we actually imported 315,000 tonnes of beef because of the gap between consumption and production caused by our exports.

And frankly I would have thought our energies would have been better devoted to getting British consumers to buy more British beef and hence British farmers to produce more of it rather than settling for often inferior imports – and I am quite free to say that now without fear of having some Eurocrat rap me across the knuckles for infringing anti-competition law.

I really believe the domestic market is ready for an all-out assault: many more consumers have turned to independent butchers (who sell British beef) during the months of restricted shopping and have become loyal customers because they like what they have encountered, and if we were on the ball we should be picking up that trend and running with it.

Particularly in view of the complaints that are so frequently voiced about the quality of (often imported) beef offered in supermarkets, from the old trick of selling pre-packed steaks carefully folded to conceal the 40 per cent of fat they include to roasting joints which still show signs

of a faint pulse and have the eating quality of inner tubes.

And people like the AHDB and the NFU are still sitting complacently on their ample hind quarters and watching as the Vegan Tendency continues to nibble away at the meat market with all kinds of grey if not outright black propaganda, and by not only hijacking terms such as ‘sausage’ and ‘burger’ but now opening vegan ‘butcheries’.

Last time I checked, the dictionary defined a butcher as ‘a person whose trade is cutting up and selling meat in a shop’ rather than someone flogging

unappetising concoctions of tofu and beans – yet no one has seen fit to challenge what appears to me to be a prima facie case of misrepresentation.

In short, George, I would suggest there is still plenty of work to be done sorting out and building up the UK market and instilling the ‘Buy British’ ethos in many more of our own consumers before we start worrying too much about precisely how overseas customers like their British sirloin steaks trimmed.

Yours ever, Ian

> Plain old beef just sounds rather underwhelming next to some fun food holidays being promoted, admits Ian