Living and working across the East Anglian countryside, the game season offers something approaching an empathetic idea of free-range dining, yet on a rising tide of good intentions it can frequently prompt a barrage of rural grumbling.
From the beginning of October to the end of January, the frequent sound of high-cost guns being discharged by high-cost hunters certainly helps to swell the farmer’s pockets. But there are many who remain notably irked by this covenant.
For me anything that reduces the subsidies with which farmers are apparently entitled from our annual personal taxation levy, gets my vote. However if choices were starkly rationed, and in the light of our imported food supply having reached an alarming 50%, I’d prefer it if they grew a covey of high quality food rather than simply charge the metropolitan elite to shoot at it. And while we’re at it, I would also prefer it if they kept a more fastidious eye on the quality of the land they’ve been lent, rather than littering it with lead shot and litres of chemicals. Nevertheless global commerce and national food distribution are inexorably linked and the ensuing fiscal manipulation serves to blur enlightened choice every time we scoot down the supermarket aisle or seek guidance from a restaurant waiter. The critical links between diet, health and the earth we inhabit, are all too frequently masked by clumsy marketing fairy tales. Not just farmers here, supermarkets after all welcome this obfuscation as greater choice and moral imperatives serve to seriously dent their handsome margins.
At this time of the year, shot partridge and pheasant are bountiful in most parts of rural Britain and although not strictly wild (they have a monitored breeding programme, are fed generously in their early life, shielded from predation and eventually released into a semi-wild environment) their lives are infinitely more tolerable than today’s factory farmed chickens.
For a pheasant or partridge released into managed woodland or across fields, they suffer, in theory, only the one bad day.
In stark contrast, across the UK, of the 2 million broiler chickens we heedlessly consign to slaughter every single day, most endure confined, miserable, often painful lives, for the entire 38 – 45 days they are incarcerated. For our cheap supermarket chickens, or those called upon by that nice Colonel Sanders, every one of their days will have been a bad day. During the permitted shooting season in the UK alone, more than 180 million factory reared chickens will be purchased from supermarket shelves, often vac-packed, and sporting a Constable-like bucolic scene never experienced by its deceased contents. Meanwhile rural butchers are teeming with inexpensive, local, free-range game birds.
Having got the global memo, shifted a little closer to a flexitarian diet, and cognisant that our future in no small part is dependent upon moving to a greener diet with a dramatic and overdue reduction in factory meat production and its attendant consumption, I have no immediate plans to go (ahem) the whole hog. But aware that we now live in a world where convenience, transportation, corporate dividend and marketing, all conspire to manipulate the bulk of our apparent food choices – shortening the food chain and actually shaking the ‘hand that feeds us’, whatever my protein of choice, still presents a persuasive argument.
Classic Roast Partridge from Ginger Pig Meat Book (2011) Tim Wilson and Frank Warde
25g butter
4 rashers of streaky bacon
2 plump partridges
Vegetable oil for the tin
25g plain flour
125 ml red wine
1 tbsp redcurrant jelly
Preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F/Gas mark 6
Smear the butter evenly over the partridge breasts and wrap with bacon
Lightly oil a small roasting tin, add partridges and place in the oven to roast for 30-35 minutes
When cooked, remove birds from the oven, place on a warm plate and keep warm
Add the flour to the roasting tin and mix well, then blend in the red wine and redcurrant jelly
Place the tin over a medium-high heat and mix well, bring to a simmer and allow the liquid to reduce slightly, then serve with the partridge