HERDS OF HAPPY MEAT
The Turners show their boars lots of love, and reap the reward in sublime flavour. By
ometimes when I look out my window at the traffic in Main Street, Clanwilliam, a nightmare rumbles by. A truck loaded with livestock that have been jolted for an hour or more on rutted farm roads. They have no water and it is 40°C. Soon their misery will deepen, and then it will be over, because they are heading to the abattoir, a squat, unlovely building near the sewerage plant.
I imagine their terror as they are herded into the execution chute, their mad rolling eyes, their bellows of panic. It’s almost enough to make me vegan. Almost; later, as dinner time approaches, I will start to feel hungry, and the thought of a lamb chop on the braai will be irresistible.
Lucky, then, that I discovered Bontebok Ridge, a farm near Wellington where they love their animals and kill them without stress or trauma. What’s more, many of the animals they kill are wild boar.
Yes, as in the meal that makes Obelix go “scronch, scronch, scronch” in the Asterix comics. About a century ago, a bunch of the beasts were brought in from Europe to roam the pine plantations around Wolseley in the Western Cape, because they eat the pupa of the moths that eat the trees. They started roaming too widely, onto the farms and into the pristine fynbos, rooting up endangered bulbs and feasting on chenin blanc grapes as they went, and generally wreaking havoc.
Enter Tom and Katja Turner of Bontebok Ridge, whose property was one of those APPLE OF HIS EYE: Tom Turner with Two Spot, one of his favourite boars frequented by the wandering boars. Where others saw a problem, they saw an asset. They corralled the beasts so they could roam freely but not leave the premises, and waited for them to multiply. From seven animals in 2010, they have about 250 now. And that’s after killing, or as they put it “harvesting”, about 200 of them.
They supply the Grand Dedale country house down the road and dozens of customers in the greater Cape Town area, including the Pot Luck Club restaurant.
The flesh of one of those harvested animals ended up on my table at Christmas. A shoulder joint. Never having eaten wild boar before, I wondered if I would go “scronch”. I did, but not immediately.
The first mouthful tasted, well . . . bland. It didn’t taste like meat usually does. I had another mouthful, and another. Then I realised what was missing — the acid flavour of fear. The meat was subtle, delicate, untainted. The difference between the flesh of an animal that has died in terror, and one that never knew what hit it.
It might sound like artisanal new-age clap-trap that the way an animal is killed affects the way its loin chops taste, but it’s been proved by actual scientists. Stress, according to august bodies like the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation which have their feet firmly on the ground, causes the flesh of pigs and other animals to go “pale, soft and exudative”. If that was not bad enough, it also makes their meat tough. So force an animal to squeeze onto a truck with dozens of others, drive it for hours in the mid-summer heat, prod it and beat it towards the smell of death at the abattoir . . . it adds up to several litres of adrenalin pumping through its veins in the final minutes, and an unsatisfactory steak.
The Turners do things differently. Their wild boar wander at will in vast camps, swimming in the dams, foraging among the blue gums and, sometimes, rooting between rows of wine grapes.
Treats for the animals include reject pears and apples from nearby packing sheds. The fruit is fine in every way, except they have blemishes which make them unacceptable for export to the picky patrons of Waitrose and Tesco. “Instead of having to dump the fruit, it comes to us . . . The packers benefit from us removing it from them at no cost, and we get it at no cost, so it’s glorious,” Tom says.
He is the wild boar equivalent of a bunny-hugger. He refers to the sows as “mammas” and the youngsters as “babies”. He has names for them. His favourite, a three-year-old called Two Spot, lets him crouch next to her and scratch her belly while he murmurs, “I love you, girl.”
“They live an exceptionally happy life here,” he says. “They’ve got dams or streams, they have no animal-human conflict. It’s a lovely, very intelligent species to work with.”
So Tom regards it as inconceivable that his beloved boars would end their days in an abattoir. “Our animals have never seen a tar road. I harvest our animals and that’s a job that has to be done.” When the time comes, he takes a .22 rifle fitted with a silencer and shoots the animals in the head as they chew on their final sweet apple.
The result is “scronch”. “Because it’s ethically grown, and you can taste it,” says Tom.