British diners need to tuck in to deer more

Venison is healthy, tasty, cheap and plentiful – it’s time we stopped being so squeamish about Bambi’s mother

It was a provocative headline in a national newspaper: “Bambinos eat Bambi”. The news this week that a chain of nurseries across Dorset and Hampshire were putting deer on the lunch menu doubtless had a clutch of mums spluttering all over their post-drop-off frothy oat lattés.

Tops Day Nurseries, with 4,000 children at 32 nurseries, was making a statement as definitive as the time in May 1990 when the then agriculture minister John Selwyn Gummer fed his four-year-old daughter Cordelia a beef burger at the East Coast Boat Show. Gummer’s bold move was to show that British beef was now safe; three years on from the catastrophic disease BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) that ripped through British cattle.

Of course, there is nothing unsafe about eating venison, far from it, but in the campaign run with Eat Wild, promoters for British game, this is a vital moment. If it’s good enough for kids, it’s fine for the rest of us. After all, we only want the best for our little darlings, so will the nation learn to follow suit?

The advantages of eating venison are endless. Not least because deer numbers are so high and they need culling. At present, some 350,000 are killed each year, but that number ought to be between 500,000 and 750,000 to simply maintain the population.

There are six species of wild deer in the UK – red, sika, fallow, roe, muntjac and water deer – of which two are indigenous. And their population is at the highest it has been, some say, for a thousand years. It’s one of the reasons we keep running them over. Some 75,000 road accidents a year are caused by deer, at a cost of

£45 million in damage to our cars.

Deer, when they’re not offering themselves up as roadkill, graze, browse and trample crops, wreck fencing and cause huge damage to forestry, particularly as they like munching on saplings. They dig up bulbs in ancient bluebell woods and strip out vital food supplies of woodland bird species, such as nightingales. And if they are too big in number, a lack of food stresses and weakens them.

In the words of Louisa Clutterbuck, the chief executive of Eat Wild, “the deer population is out of control, so there is absolutely no problem with supply”. Which is not something one could ever say about beef, chicken or pork. Even though the UK has some of the highest welfare standards in the world, these animals are effectively factory-farmed. There is no other way of keeping up with the demand.

Venison is low in fat, with incomparably low levels of saturated fat, is high in Vitamin B and iron, and is a tremendous source of protein. It also tastes fantastic and is every bit as versatile as beef. Apparently the tots at Tops wolf down their venison bolognese. And you’ll frequently see it on the menus of restaurants across the country, with certain chefs consistently championing the meat. One such is the restaurateur, game hunter, fisherman and tank driver Mike Robinson. He is a proselytiser for venison with the fervour of Billy Graham. Indeed, I once witnessed him convert a vegan to the cause. He bangs on about it on Instagram, sells it by the box load and encourages every chef he meets to put venison on their menu. But still we desist. And quite why is a tale of the hypocrisy of the modern consumer. That it is wild is a bit too real for our liking, that deer are hunted and shot is a bit too horrid for our sensibilities.

We prefer chicken because it’s nice and safe and plain and an absorber, a conduit to flavour, rather than a protagonist. So we’ll always choose that over the more flavoursome, more sustainable rabbit.

And we choose the safer options of pork, beef or lamb over venison because they are as familiar and safe as potatoes and they look nice under the lights on the counter, whereas venison tends more to the colour of grey.

And regardless of the endless marketing of provenance, consumers are interested in recipe and flavour rather than the wheres and hows of an animal’s life. Which is the problem with venison. The problem with this whole article. It’s all about the damn back story. Meat sells when it’s PR’d as something that sizzles and oozes and is covered in sauce and is another excuse to spoon on the Dijon.

And while, because I’m weird, I can handle and relish the stalk, the spy, the shot, the gralloch and the butchery, and feel that the more I know, the better it tastes, I can appreciate and refuse to condemn the bulk of consumers who wish to remain clueless hypocrites, who just want a nice burger and chips and a glass of wine (and don’t care either how the grapes were squished and fermented).

So congrats to Eat Wild for this week purveying the key message: it’s healthy, great value and makes kids eat their tea.

Jolly good fallow: consumers need some convincing that the deer we see in Richmond Park would provide a great source of protein