Janet Street Porter did a piece on ‘The F Word’ about how Bernard Mathews’ Turkeys are reared in Denmark (but born in the UK). She seemed to emphasise this as a terrible scandal, and they should be ashamed of themselves for not labelling their turkey meat as coming from turkeys reared outside Britain.
The whole time I watched this my mouth was O shaped. I could not believe they were making an issue of the fact the turkeys were in a different country for a while. If there is some valid, maybe quarantine related reason for this being a bad thing they didn’t mention it. They just made it out to be bad that they weren’t reared in britain. As if being reared in denmark somehow makes them inferior. Sub-turkey.
Please enlighten me if I have missed the point of the piece and this is not a case of xenophobia at all.
There’s a very huge “Buy British” movement going on amongst celebrity chefs at the moment. Rick Stein is the main offender, but Hugh F-W and Gordon are getting in on it as well. They’re trying to bring back the Great British Menu, and are spending hours waxing poetic about how sad it is that all the food is reared and imported from cheaper farms overseas, rather than the lovingly hand-reared geese from lower Dovingshire that are fed on free range grass and cost 40 quid more than the ones from, say, Denmark.
But people are buying into it. They’re spending more on smallholder reared produce that may or may not be better quality than that imported from overseas - and if companies are selling their turkeys as “British Turkeys” then in the interest of consumer truthfulness then it is indeed a big deal that they don’t disclose that these turkeys are actually reared in another country, and thus some of the proceeds from that sale are going to the Danish farmers.
Having seen Janet on other episodes of “The F Word” (though not this particular one I admit) I think that is more the impetus for her complaints, than actual concern about the quality of the birds themselves. If people want to buy British, they should be able to be confident in the fact that the items they are buying are wholly British and aren’t raised/manufactured outside the country.
Am I understanding this correctly - someone hatches turkeys in the UK, then for some reason ships them to Denmark, only to have the meat shipped back to the UK? That seems…curious.
So, what’s wrong with wanting to buy locally-produced food? I try to do that all the time. I buy veggies from local farm stands and produce stores, and buy “in season” stuff. I get my milk from a dairy up the road in my hometown where they bottle milk from their cows right there at the farm. I don’t see any “xenophobia” there.
“The F Word” is a tv programme hosted by Gordon Ramsay. It’s one of those general lifestyle type shows where he gets some hapless saps into his kitchen and yells them through a service, meanwhile sucking up to whatever b-rate celeb he’s roped into attending his restaurant and occasionally crossing to serial pieces about the state of food in England or where he goes into some woman’s kitchen and teaches her how to make a roast.
Having placed a Bernard Matthews turkey drumstick in my mouth before now, I confess I’m surprised that turkey is involved at all, regardless of nationality. The impression I gained was more one of sawdust and glue, lightly breaded.
Count me a misinformed idiot if you like, but weren’t turkeys a denizen of the New World? Aren’t they imports already? Or is it British enough if it’s been there for a few centuries?
I’m curious as to why they would export the turkeys to Denmark, though. Somehow it doesn’t seem like a place where raising them would be a whole lot cheaper than in Britain.
