Vote with your pounds for local meat
I write to you off the back of Great British Game Week. Venison bone broth was the very first broth I ever made in my static home kitchen whilst studying for my nutritional therapist qualification. I’d just come home from solo travelling around Asia for five months after quitting my corporate job and leaving my flat in London. My attention was heavily in the literature around big pharma, big food and big agriculture. I was slightly obsessed with uncovering the truth about the food we were being sold. Whilst making super nutritious, organic meals at home, I was still adding shop bought ultra processed stock cubes to my recipes, and I thought there must be a better way.
Fast forward a year, I’d qualified as a nutritional therapist with the NTA and had started to dabble in bone broth. It was alien to me at the time, I didn’t really know what I was doing and the broth I used to make was awful and nothing like what I make today, but it had flavour and was making my favourite curry, stew and gravy recipes taste insane. Friends started to hear that I was making bone broth and asked me to make it for them whilst each coming with their own broth stories and I thought maybe there is something in this. I’ll leave the topsy turvy story of how I finally got to the kitchen I’m in now for another time.
Today, I want to talk to you about how incredible wild and local meat is. Wild venison in particular, since that is a broth flavour and is the most sustainable meat option we could be consuming in the UK. Often locally shot, the deer has had a natural life with no human interventions whilst eating a species appropriate diet and contributing to the conservation of our natural habitat. Though the best thing about wild venison, for me, is that it has had no abattoir stress.
On Thursday morning, Holly from Butterbox Farm and I went to look round Downlands Traditional Meats based in Henfield, which is run by Luke who took on the lease as he wanted to be in control of how his own animals ended their lives and was becoming increasingly concerned about non-stun slaughter practices which have beome widely adopted across the UK. Coincidentally, Luke and I went to Plumpton College at the same time and whilst he was studying agriculture, I was studying equine science.
Holly and I were freely welcomed for a tour which we both took up immediately. The abattoir is the only process of animal rearing that I hadn’t witnessed. I’ve reared calves whilst working on an intensive dairy farm in Australia, I’ve helped during calving time on my old boss’s small farm, I’ve seen calves take their first suckle to being ready for slaughter, loaded up on the trailer and then returning to be butchered and end up as a steak on my plate. Yet that middle part that nobody wants to think about was left out and I felt a deep responsibility both personally and professionally as somebody who eats meat and produces a meat product to experience every stage that animal goes through.
So, I pulled up my pants and drove rather anxiously to Downlands Traditional Meats with Holly and I both wondering on the way there what on earth we were doing. We arrived at the office as farmers were reversing their trailers to unload into the lairage pens, which hold the animals before processing. Sheep including lamb, mutton and rams were being processed whilst we were there from local and some not so local farms as this abattoir is now one of the last remaining we have in the South East.
The ladies in the office were really friendly, we were offered tea whilst we waited and handed our white suits and red hats to wear whilst walking around. Luke turned up a while later fresh from helping in the butchery and looking slightly downtrodden from the fresh faced college lad I knew. We were first taken to the butchery. Customers can either take their whole carcasses back or have them cut and delivered at Downlands by Luke’s team. Through the butchery, we then walked past several large chillers which hang the carcasses and then into the slaughter hall. The slaughter hall contains a kill box for cattle, a pig dehairing box, hoisting systems and overhead railing, hide pullers, a pneumatic saw and offal hooks.
Luke was completely transparent about the whole process and actively kept encouraging us to ask any questions we had. Whilst we were talking, Luke warned us that some lambs would start coming through. The lambs would have been checked by a vet who is provided by E&J a subscontractor of the Food Standards Agency. The vet is on site all day assessing animals and walking around the plant for a generous sum paid by Luke of £15,000.00 per month. I stayed chatting to Luke and took a side glance as the overhead railings started to bring in the lambs, which by then had been stunned in the stun box outside and attached to a chain by their back leg to the hoisting system to bring them into the slaughter hall where their throats were slit and they were left to bleed out. The stunning process knocks them unconscious, so they don’t feel any pain going forwards. The slaughter men have strict timings to adhere to for this step and watching it is like a military process with 6-7 men working in sync to keep the line moving in a very efficent manner. Everything is done manually, there is no automation in this abattoir and the manual labour and skill required is imense.
From then on, the lambs were skinned, some were split in half with the pneumatic saw before being passed to the meat inspector who is employed by the Food Standards Agency. Their job is to check that the offal and carcass is fit for human consumption and if so, the carcass is stamped with the abattoir number. If you ever see a stamp on your joint of meat you can link it to the abattoir it was processed in. The carcasses are then taken through the line, tagged with key traceability, health, and classification details and then taken to the chillers where they take up to 24 hours to come down to a chilled temperature and then into the butchery or onto the chill lorries to continue the journey it takes to end up on your plate.
On our way back round we went to the lairage pens to see the stun box. This is where I thought I would be coming back home vegetarian. The head slaughterman used a large set of tongs which are charged to create the stun. The flock of lambs were in the same lairage pen together next to the slaughter hall. They can’t see in, but they can hear the noises around them and they can see their flock mate being stunned and hoisted up. We saw the first one stunned, peered over the pen and Holly and I both looked at each other and said “is that it?”. A little tickle on the ear and the lamb was unconscious, hoisted up by the back leg and taken along the overhead rails into the slaughter hall. To be completely honest, I don’t think the other lambs had a clue what was happening. It would be more stressful to split the lambs and I think it is easy to put our human emotions onto an animal without thinking about the bigger picture.
After speaking with Luke a couple of days later, he too has been interested in the work of Dr Temple Grandin who’s autisim became the source of groundbreaking insights into animal cognition and humane livestock design. I’d recommend watching the film ‘Temple Grandin’ and the more recent documentary ‘Temple Grandin: An Open Door’. Luke said that their small plant wouldn’t be able to afford her time but he is always thinking and watching animal behaviours, how they move and what they can do better.
My takings from this
Did I see anything that made me want to never eat meat again? No
Do I feel more connected and respectful to the meat that I eat? Yes
Ultimately, if we want to eat local meat, and that means meat that hasn’t travelled miles for slaughter, meat that is traceable, meat that supports the local economy and ecosystems, then we have to support local abattoirs because without them, we risk handing over even more power to large supermarket chains whose slaughter houses are far larger, far more stressful and further away. Without them we don’t get local meat back to our small butchers and farm shops. Everything gets bigger, welfare standards slip, how an animal is slaughtered becomes less transparent, produce is less traceable and the 1% take on a greater portion (if you want a good book on this read the Oneness vs the 1% by Vandana Shiva - I volunteered on her biodynamic farm when I was in India).
We now have 200 small abattoirs in the UK. That’s over a 90% loss since the 1970s with numbers dwindling due to increased running costs, lack of joined up thinking between local authorities, no succession plan for an ageing industry and outdated infrastructure for the increased demand.
Vote with your pounds
I started Asthi because I couldn’t find anything on the market I was happy with. I wanted good ingredients with a story I trusted and backed. I built a brand so that I could become its first customer. Anyone who knows me will know how pedantic I am about the small details on a personal level and how that transfers into Asthi’s ethics, and I want and will fight to continue to provide a product that meets them. That means being able to source bones as locally as possible, from animals that have lived a happy and healthy life which has ended humanely. We owe that to them.
We can’t wait for government backing or legislation to change in support of small abattoirs. That takes years, and time is not on our side. The catastrophic effect that will be felt from small abattoirs closing is incomprehensible. Buy your meat from a local farm or butcher. Buy your produce from a local business. Put your money in the places that you want to see exist in years to come. How you spend your money influences what and how something is produced. So spend wisely.
Back to the broth
Where does bone broth fit into all of this? For me, it’s the part of the story that finishes the job. When an animal is slaughtered, the steaks and joints are only a fraction of what it gives us. The bones, knuckles and marrow are so often overlooked, yet that’s where so much of the goodness sits: collagen, minerals and amino acids that our ancestors would never have dreamt of wasting. Making broth is my way of honouring the whole animal. If a deer has lived wild on our land, or a cow has been raised on a local farm and processed a few miles down the road, then the very least we can do is use every part of it.
That first venison bone broth I made in my little home kitchen was the moment I swapped the stock cube for something real, something with a story I could trace and that’s still what Asthi is about today.
