January 2017 at Wark Farm
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- 08-12-2017
I was given a book for Christmas this year called the Ethical Carnivore: My Year Killing to Eat. Coals to Newcastle perhaps for this particular farmer & butcher but in it the author explores the origins of the meat in our diets and hands on is involved in killing a number of the animals she goes on to eat. An admirable project, but you'll have to wait for the book review as I've not made it far into the text yet. I know that the life and death of the animals we eat is an issue of great concern to many of my customers and the end of life questions are frequently a point of discussion when we have farm walks here and also when introducing the farm to potential new customers. I know plenty people who avoid meat altogether to absent themselves from any part of the process and I fully respect that position. Some months I feel like it myself! I have personally pulled the trigger or pulled the neck on everything from snipe and quail through rabbits, grouse, chickens, geese, sheep, pigs, deer and cattle and killed not a few fish along the way too. I have toured abattoirs and every month I take batches of animals which I've cared for and enjoyed working with, in some instances for years, to slaughter. It's not easy. But for me it's part of being a meat eater to face up to the fact an animal dies to produce that pack of meat or that pie. Personally I don't think it's necessary that all omnivores should have to have participated in the death of their meat, even if just once, but it is certainly good to have thought about it. It's very seldom that I get riled by a question from someone I'm talking to about the farm, but the one that always does is ‘how can you eat the meat from the animals you've raised?'. For me, and I suspect for many of you, knowing the story of where there food comes from is so important and if I can't acknowledge that as part of that an animal died to produce that meal, then it's vegetables for me. You can be assured that if you buy from Wark Farm a great deal of ethical concern, probably more than is good for my sensibilities, has gone into putting that piece of meat into your order.