Surfeit of game
It seems that the price of game has once again plummeted a few months into the pheasant season. I was picking up on a small family shoot yesterday and was handed two brace of pheasants and a leash of red-legs by the farmer as I was about to leave. When I asked him how much I owed him he laughed and told me I was doing him a favour. The nice bag of 50-head had given all the Guns (who wanted them) their brace and the farmer told me it was not cost-effective to use two gallons of diesel driving to our nearest registered game dealer, especially with pheasants at 10p and the partridges being worthless. (I have since been told that some dealers are actually charging commercial shoots to dispose of French partridges.)
Some people point an accusing finger at the game dealers, whom they claim are profiteering but I doubt this is the case. The expenses involved in running an approved game-processing establishment are formidable, not to mention the cost of labour, electricity, premises maintenance, insurance, vehicles and Food Standard Agency veterinary hygiene visits.
A few years back I visited a game dealer in early September who showed me his huge freezer (comparable to most modern barns for size) that was packed full of dozens of pallets of frozen, oven-ready partridges from the previous season. Despite the hard work done by the Game to Eat initiative there clearly isn’t a big market for our game. Not that I’m complaining; I was brought up during the period of post-war austerity when woodpigeons, rabbits and waterhens were all saleable commodities ‘off ration’ and people were not too squeamish to pluck or skin game, and I’m still not. Mind you, we didn’t have any food banks to visit during those hard times.
G Lorne, via email