“The industrial eater is one who does not know that eating is an industrial act...the condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free”.
Wendell Berry. Farmer and essayist.
At the time of writing, it’s the middle of the game season, and every year I greet it with mixed feelings. Or rather it greets me. Surrounded by fields as I am, the sound of a local pheasant shoot is clearly audible. By contrast the demise of domestic farm animals in a distant abattoir is expediently inaudible.
Nevertheless, it is increasingly evident that when confronted with the interface of an industrialised and destructive food system alongside our present climate crisis the choice of supper carries consequences way beyond the simple demand for nourishment.
For some, the focus of this conflation is symbolised by our reckless land use. That’s not just the grazing requirements of assorted herbivores, but the attendant acreage required for their winter food supply too. Disarming to find that today, 40% of the world’s precious arable land is exclusively used to grow animal feed.
And the increasing demand for arable land means increasing de-forestation.
But in the post war period, both here and across the Atlantic, it is the chicken that has come to dominate the meat supply in our food chain with consumption having increased by a whopping 70% amongst wealthy countries since 1990.
Whilst the American public now manage to eat a staggering 23 million chickens every single day, here in the UK our daily tally is still a creditable 2.4 million chickens – creditable if you’re a chicken breeder that is.
Their feed is principally built from soya beans, 3 million tonnes of which we complicitly import from forest-decimated Brazil each year. The vast majority are reared under highly intensive farming methods in crinkly tin sheds that permit no natural light, with each narcotised bird spending its entire life hemmed in to an area no larger than an A4 sheet of paper. Over 70% are raised for meat (broilers, rather than layers), and slaughtered at less than 42 days old. Every single day for these chickens is a bad day.
Outside of their sheds a soup of agrochemicals harbouring phosphates, pesticides, carcinogens and antibiotics, resulting from the manure run-off, frequently leach into adjacent rivers starving the waterways of oxygen, increasing algae growth and killing fish. Freshwater fish, frogs and toads, all have many bad days before they in turn face an abrupt demise.
The issue is somewhat sanitised by the chirpy advice of our favourite TV chefs to “source a free-range bird” in their endless chicken recipes. This sanctimonious advice may well be sound, but the awkward truth is that if every chicken consumed around the globe were free range, we would require two additional planets on which to raise them.
In summary, the inescapable truth is that countries like the UK and the USA must begin to both consume and rear far fewer domestic birds, farm them less barbarically, and feed them more sustainably. To champion any one of the three might be a good start for supper tonight.
So let us return to the rather paradoxical nature of those more than conspicuous seasonal shoots and forgive me for rattling through my pheasant manifesto. However it could so easily apply to our other seasonal food sources – rabbit and squirrel. And let’s not forget venison when we’re trying to keep those rain forests intact.
In simple terms game birds, such as pheasant, pigeon and partridge, enjoy a varied, foraged, drug free diet. A natural diet their captive chicken cousins could only dream of. They are also the epitome of ‘free range’, with farmland, meadow, lakeside and woodland, their lifelong purview.
Beyond the distant crack of an over-and-under Beretta, they have only one bad day.
My own recipe for pheasant pie.
Sheet of ready-made puff pastry
2 whole pheasants
60 ml olive oil
60 gms butter
1 medium onion, chopped
2 medium leeks, white part sliced into 2 cm pieces, retain green scraps
250 gms mushrooms
3 garlic cloves, crushed
30 gms plain flour
3 tbsp chopped parsley
2 tbsp thyme leaves
2 bay leaves
1 tbsp Dijon mustard
300 ml double cream
1 egg, beaten
The filling
Preheat your oven to 200 ℉/180 ℃ fan.
Using a sharp knife remove pheasant breasts along the bone.
Remove and reserve the skin.
Slice the meat diagonally into 2 cm strips, put to one side.
Rub the carcasses with 2tbsp olive oil and season.
Place in a baking tray and bake until browned (around 40 minutes).
Set aside and turn off oven
Transfer carcasses and any juices and skin into a large saucepan, add the leek scraps.
Fill with 2 litres of cold water and bring to the boil.
Turn the heat down to medium and simmer for 2 hours. Afterwards strain the stock into a bowl.
When contents of strainer are cool enough to handle, pull the meat from the carcasses discarding bones skin and vegetable scraps.
Coarsely chop the pulled meat and put in a large bowl.
Clean the saucepan, add the remaining oil and turn the heat to medium. When the oil is hot add the reserved breast meat and cook on all sides until browned.
Add to the bowl with mixed meat.
Add the leeks and onion to the saucepan until softened, then add butter, mushrooms and garlic, stirring occasionally.
Stir in the flour and reserved meat until blended.
Stir in the herbs, mustard and reserved stock. Bring to the boil.
Turn the heat down to medium and leave to gently simmer for about an hour.
Add the cream (keeping a tbsp aside) and gently cook until amalgamated.
Season to taste then scrape the entire contents into a 3 litre baking dish. Set aside to cool.
Preheat the oven to 200 ℉/180 ℃ fan.
Place the rolled sheet of dough over the filling, trimming and crimping as you go.
Lightly beat the egg and remaining cream and brush the pastry with the egg wash. Pop a hole in the surface to release the steam.
Bake until the crust is golden brown, around 45 minutes.
Wine thoughts
Nothing else needed other than a crackling dry Burgundian Chablis with a little bottle age. After all, it was Phillip Duke of Burgundy (a great pheasant enthusiast) who founded the Order of the Pheasant in 1455.