The premise for Meat the Family sounds like it came straight out of the animal activist’s handbook – families are given young farm animals to rear for three weeks, knowing that they will be condemned to slaughter unless the family adopts a vegetarian diet.
The show had the potential to be a complete media beat-up, but it was refreshingly impartial.
I expected to see cute baby animals with endearing names and uninitiated urban families dry-retching in abattoirs. I was not wrong. But, I also saw sheep undertaking intelligence tests at Oxford university, German pigs putting money in piggy banks and preteens eating bull’s testicles. It was actually a pretty good watch.
There were four British families that were followed over the three-part series.
I will refer to them as the chick family, the pig family, the lamb family and the calf family because those were the animals they were given to look after – and because I haven’t dutifully memorised the names of the 17 people in the experiment.
The chick family visited a humongous multi-story chicken farm that gave everybody (including me) pause for thought. The kids taught their chickens to perform a circus for the family. And then they ate their pet chickens Clucky, Jennifer and Hayley. The youngest kid didn’t even blink, “tastes good” she said, shrugging to whoever had stuck the camera in her face.
The adults had a harder time of it, but they knew that their selectively-bred meat birds were not capable of living much beyond the usual 6-week slaughter age and no one in the family was prepared to be vegetarian.
I felt a little sorry for the chick family because three roasting birds was a bit of a stiff deal in comparison to the two whole porkers that the next family received.
The pig family’s pork was hard won, though. They gave vegetarianism a go, but it wasn’t sticking with their meat-loving family. They took bacon off the menu after researching the nitrates used in food preservation and vowed to be more conscious of their food choices. They wept inconsolably and then resolutely committed Pauline and Renie to slaughter.
The lamb family was all in. They lambed a ewe. They castrated a ram lamb.They visited an abattoir and were pleasantly surprised at how civil it all was. The father stayed up all night guarding the lambs cause he thought they were too small to be on their own. They looked like they could give the whole sheep farming thing a bit of a go until the farmer mentioned how little he earned. The kids campaigned to save the lambs from slaughter, but in the end everyone was pretty chuffed at how much meat Gucci and Chanel provided.
This brings us to the calf family, which contained out-and-out carnivores and vegetarians from the onset. How this family came to be is a mystery.
The mother and one of the daughters had been vegetarian for years. The son and the father would eat literally anything that once walked. And I mean everything. They tried to convince the vegetarian faction that they could contribute to fewer animal deaths if they substituted more of their choice cuts with offal. We saw them eat a lot of offal.
In the end, the whole calf family committed to a vegetarian diet and the Jersey bull calves went to live at an animal sanctuary.
A cynic might argue that three weeks of calf rearing isn’t long enough for the true Jersey bull experience. The carnivorous father and son might have gone straight for the jugular if they were there to witness Tomos and Bedwyr riding and brawling when they got older.
But, it was their decision to make and they put a lot of legwork into it.
The vegetarian calf family was not anti-meat, they were well aware that meat could be farmed sustainably and that, conversely, vegetable production could be unsustainable. They just went a different way to the other families and we will respect that.
Besides, it would be petty to nitpick when the score is 3:1 to the meat eaters.
Naturally, the vegan community were not receptive to Meat the Family.
Open letters were written to the broadcasters about this “abhorrent” and “disturbing” show.
To be fair, I think we farmers would have done the same if the score was reversed. It’s not like eating backyard pets is the cornerstone of agriculture.
Anyway, I learnt something from the show. Something that I used to know, but forgot after years of dealing with risk-averse levy industry bodies and research institutes. I relearned that most people can handle a ‘warts and all’ tour of food production.
When we step out of the bizarre and artificial meat versus veggie shouting match that takes place in the media, we are reminded that our consumers are actually fully-fledged adults who are capable of making balanced decisions.
