On the olive podcast

Find out why we should be eating more of this rich, deeply flavoured meat from Cabrito founder James Whetlor

Find out why we should be eating more rich, deeply avoured goat meat

Waste in goat dairy farming

In any dairy system, you only require one male but a lot of females. In order to produce the milk, you require pregnancy and the kid goats born will be 50-50 male and female – so you have all these males that are not needed. In Western farming we have little cultural history of eating goat so, up until Cabrito came along, in the overwhelming majority of cases, all those billy goats were euthanised because the farmer couldn’t find a market for them. Supermarkets didn’t want to touch them and the public wasn’t ready to eat them.

Cabrito

Cabrito was founded on the idea of ending this waste. I became a middleman – at the time there wasn’t the link between the market and the farms, so I’d go to the slaughterhouse, pick the goats up and drive them to London. I’d worked in the London restaurant industry so I knew the chefs’ language and was able to build relationships with those chefs who had an interest. I think key to all of this is that chefs are now more interested in sustainability than they ever have been.

The future

When I first started in restaurants, 20 years ago, your meat supplier was an answering machine that you’d call at 11pm, leave a message and it would turn up the next day before you got there and you’d never see them. Now I am in 100 chefs’ phones around the country. And that relationship between small suppliers and chefs is one of the key points that is changing food now – food developers go and eat at the restaurants that have goat on the menu and think, oh, we need to get this back into the supermarkets because obviously there’s a desire for it. So the entire food system is being shaped by chefs and suppliers in a really significant way.

Goat meat

In the past there wasn’t any effort being put into the husbandry of these animals. What we’ve done is to help standardise the outputs, worked on the diets, we’ve had a lot of help from the farmers to try to make the animals as good as they can be. And goat is very good for you – it has half the fat of skinned chicken, it’s high in iron, high in protein, low in fat. And it tastes great.

James Whetlor is founder of cabrito.co.uk, a champion of goatober.com in the UK and the author of Goat: Cooking and Eating (£20, Quadrille). Listen to episode 169 of the magazine podcast to hear more about O his quest to put goat on the menu.