Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:38 — 18.6MB)
Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS | More
Dairy cows unavoidably produce male calves that are of no use to the dairy industry. They used to end up as veal, and in 1960, Britons ate more than 600,000 calves worth of the stuff. By the 1980s, that had dropped to less than 35,000. Ten years ago, a UK trade magazine said that “public opinion … generally regards veal as ethically somewhere between dodo omelettes and panda fritters”.
And yet, today there’s no shortage of veal and no surplus of dairy bullocks.
Time was when veal calves were kept in the dark. These days, it may be the shoppers who have helped to solve the problem of surplus male dairy calves. Behind the shift is a complicated story of moral outrage, utterly unpredictable disease outbreaks and the willingness of some strange bedfellows to work together to solve a difficult problem for the food supply system.
Notes
- Gillian Hopkinson is a senior lecturer at Lancaster University School of Management.
- Clips from BBC Radio 4 – You and Yours and BBC World Service – Witness, Mad cow disease – CJD.
- Music by Podington Bear.
- Banner photo of two Dutch dairy calves by Peter Nijenhuis and cover by debstreasures.
Final resurrected episode before the new season gets going next week is about the astonishing turnaround in attitudes to veal in the UK, with @gillhopk
eatthispodcast.com/whatever-happe…
How about deep-fried chick on a stick?
France to ban culling of unwanted male chicks by end of 2021 BBC news told us yesterday, and I could barely contain my disbelief. Unwanted males are the price you pay for specialised breeds, whether dairy cows or layer hens.
If the ban is upheld, the only outcome I can foresee is more expensive eggs. The male chicks won’t be raised for meat because that’s another specialist rôle and they just can’t compete. I can’t see any kind of market emerging for chicken veal, even though the UK has slowly re-integrated male calves into its food supply. What will happen to the 7 billion unwanted male chicks a year that the BBC says are killed? There’s talk of sexing chicks in the egg. Although the chicken industry long ago made sexing newly hatched chicks a doddle, using that kind of technology to deal with an unhatched chick just pushes back any ethical dilemma a couple of days earlier.
Livestock researchers have been working for decades on reliable and affordable methods for sexing sperm, because there would be a huge and immediate market to avoid the “waste” of the unwanted sex. Of course that wouldn’t work for chickens, because it is the egg, rather than the sperm, that determines the sex of the offspring, but that might actually make it easier. Some sort of meiotic drive might be a solution, leading either male or female ova to die. Or maybe chickens could be selected (or manipulated?) so that, like many reptiles, the sex of the offspring is determined by the temperature during incubation.
In the meantime, if you object to the culling of male chicks (or, indeed, the unwanted sex of any livestock) your best bet is probably to seek out old-fashioned farmers who still raise multi-purpose breeds.
Syndicated from the mothership
Listened to Whatever happened to British veal? Too cute to eat, or the only ethical response? by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast
The realities of milk and beef production may not always square with our societal morality. Things are more complicated than they may seem and require second and third level thought and problem solving to come up with worthwhile solutions. I remember outcry when I was younger and knew that things had shifted, but haven’t heard any follow up stories until now. Glad to know that things seem to have reached some sort of equilibrium that seems generally acceptable.
Syndicated copies to:
@nicolakidsbooks I don’t believe I have either. But pink veal is delicious.
Really loved this episode – sooo interesting but I have never eaten veal in the uk@
Array
Thanks to @EatPodcast ! Here I’m talking about my work on markets for #veal and #dairybeef .