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Food

This Box of Meat Could Save Britain’s Butchers

The "meat box," a package of fresh sausage, steak, and mince shipped directly to customers from farms with onsite butchers, is so much more than male genital-related banter.
Photo courtesy Todenham Manor Farm.

The meat box—perhaps the ultimate food-based innuendo.

Despite the questionable name, the meat box is so much more than a carnivorous orgy of sausages, mince, steaks, and male genital-related banter ("Oi Tone! Check out m'meat box!" etc). It might just be the ethical, anti-supermarket answer to Britain's butchery woes.

Consisting of fresh meat products delivered directly to customers from farms with their own butchers, the boxes could get people back buying locally sourced meat.

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READ MORE: This Butcher Cuddles With His Pigs Before He Kills Them

Because everyone knows high street butchers are folding quicker than a Y-front-clad card player in a game of strip poker. In the last 20 years, their numbers have dropped by 70 percent.

A lot of this is down to supermarkets buying cheap cuts of meat from abroad, lowering the market value of British meat. Many independently owned farms are turning to onsite butchery as a way of regaining control of pricing.

"Farmers put a lot of effort into rearing their animals and this effort isn't always reflected in the market value they receive," says Jim Lewis, the onsite butcher at independent Cotswold farm (and meat box purveyors) Todenham Manor Farm. "But an onsite butchery provides a traceability that gives a marketable edge over inferior, cheaper alternatives. This value can then be re-invested in the animals in order to maintain standards."

meat-box-todenham-farm

Photo courtesy Todenham Manor Farm.

I can see that "marketable edge" the minute I open the lid on the box Todenham Manor Farm deliver to my door. The mince is ruby red and luscious looking—none of that brown nonsense you get in the supermarkets that looks like an old scarf dipped in coffee. And when I fried it up for a spot of spag bol? Hallelujah! No Tears of our Lady-style weeping of water into the pan.

Thanks to lack of food miles and ethical rearing, this meat is quality. As Lewis explains, Todenham doesn't pump their meat full of artificial chemicals or cut corners with artificial thickeners, flavour enhancers, or preservatives. The animals are slaughtered at an abattoir literally up the road, before the carcasses are returned to the manor where they're hanged for 28 days (the pigs for at least five days), then butchered and packaged at Todenham's own facility. Finally, they're shipped to a kitchen near you.

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"We go past our animals each day on the farm, know exactly where they have come from and how they spend their day-to-day lives. Would your average supermarket butcher be able to offer the same? I doubt it," Lewis says. "This isn't a mass-produced product, it's nose to tail butchery and cut for quality rather than quantity."

Of course, traceability isn't unique to farms with onsite butchers. The Red Tractor label, established in 2000, is a mark of farm traceability commonly seen in supermarkets. But it doesn't quite carry the reassurance of a fresh meat box, delivered from farm to front door, does it?

What supermarkets do indisputably offer is low prices and even Lewis admits that Todenham don't sell the "cheapest product," and that "cost is a huge factor for people nowadays."

We go past our animals each day on the farm, know exactly where they have come from and how they spend their day-to-day lives. Would your average supermarket butcher be able to offer the same?

However, according to Eating Better's 2013 YouGov survey, half of meat-eating Britons are willing to pay more if they get flavoursome hunks of meat produced by local and ethical British farmers.

Part of the reason for this shift away from cheaper, supermarket bought fodder is—still—the 2013 horsemeat scandal.

In its wake, the Head of the National Farmers Union told supermarkets to buy high quality, traceable British produce. A subsequent survey by the National Farmers Union later that year also revealed that, post-Horsegate, 43 percent of Britons would rather buy traceable food from farms in Britain than the supermarket.

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Waitrose and Morrison's were the only supermarket chains to dodge the equine-shaped bullet. Why? Because they have their own collection of farms or a traceable meat and butchery supply chain.

Oliver Seabright, butcher at London's The Quality Chop House, says he likes the concept of farmers selling direct to consumers.

"It saves them getting screwed over when they try and sell finished animals at the market to hard nosed butchers and slaughterhouses," he says.

todenham-farm-butcher-meat-box

Photo courtesy Todenham Manor Farm.

According to Seabright, the problem is that these farms can put the "meat before the butchery," with an unsold excess meat often being vacuum-packed and frozen. He'd much rather see butchers kept alive on the high street "where people can walk in get loads of choice, great service, and great quality."

Indeed many in the industry would like to see the cogs working together in this way—expanding the ethos of ethical farming, butchery, and buying across the whole spectrum (while booting out the bullying supermarkets).

"I have always wondered why butchers and farmers in local regions don't set up collectives," says Seabright. "l have a share in a vertically integrated business where all the meat is reared butchered and sold in house. Just like The Ginger Pig [a 3000-acre North Yorkshire farm that supplies seven London butchers] but rather than one farm, it could be a few."

READ MORE: Meet the Young Dutch Butcher Who Is Trying to Save Horse Meat

There are already collectives that do exactly that. The Well Hung Meat Company delivers its Devonshire meat all over Britain, as do North Lancashire's Green Pasture Farms. Story Organic delivers personalised boxes of Somerset-reared meat to customers in the Bristol area.

There's a supply and a demand for the produce commonly associated with meat boxes bought once or twice a year for a barbecue in the back garden. But will we ever see farming and butchery collectives rolled out on a national scale, ensuring traceability, high quality meat, and ethical farming?

Todenham owner, Irayne Paikin, who originally sent off her cattle to abattoirs that supplied Marks & Spencer and Waitrose, thinks there's a sea change coming.

"I think that people are now much more interested in where their food comes from and ask a lot more questions," he says. "We love answering questions, we like inquisitive people who will question the origins of what is on their plate, and we do see this growing and only see this as a good thing."