British consumers love cheese, milk and yoghurt, but to keep the cows producing all that milk, they need to keep calving. This works out fine for female calves, but not so great for young bulls. As the offspring of dairy herds such as Guernsey, Ayrshire and Friesians, these bull calves do not tend to grow up to make good beef, and their fate has been a varied and, at times, inhumane one.
Until 1990, when the British government banned transporting animals in close-confinement crates, many of the bull calves were exported, mostly to the Netherlands, where animal welfare standards are lower than they are here.
Then it became common practice to slaughter and dispose of male calves at just a day or two old. Carol Yesson, a Stop Calf Exports Campaign Officer at Compassion in World Farming, says that an estimated 7,000 to 9,000 male calves are destroyed in the UK each month. And this year, as close-confinement crates were banned throughout the rest of the EU, we are back to exporting up to 3,000 a week. "But we fear that may double if Defra don't take action to stop calf exports," says Yesson. "Most of the calves exported end up in the Netherlands and Belgium where the barren, group-housing system is commonplace. And some animals undertake incredibly long journeys, of up to 100 hours, to Spain and Italy. A Compassion in World Farming report published in May 2007 with Bristol University showed that death and disease following transport can be high and that for a two-week-old calf, transportation is incredibly stressful and causes undue suffering."
Molly Dineen's recent documentary - The Lie of the Land - highlighted Britain's un-joined-up farming practices. One scene follows a Cornish knackerman driving around in his truck, picking up all these day-old calves (this is known candidly, if gruesomely, as "the flesh run"), often having to shoot them as well. He gets paid about £3 per animal. At one point, a farmer leaves him two quid and a packet of fudge to destroy just about the healthiest, most doe-eyed brown calf I have ever seen. Meanwhile, according to the Meat and Livestock Commission, we import 95% of the 2,000 tonnes of veal we eat every year from the continent. I am certainly not blaming our farmers, who do tough jobs, but clearly this system has been failing.
Helen Browning, an organic livestock farmer, and food and farming director of the Soil Association, says, "Historically, for most dairy farmers, male calves are seen as having no useful function - but due to the increasing demand for veal, as well as more and more people wanting to buy British, things are changing."
Abroad, traditionally, veal calves are kept in close individual pens, a tragedy in itself as cows are social animals that need to touch and have eye contact with other members of the herd. To keep their meat as pale as possible they are kept in the dark, fed only milk (not solids, which they need to grow strong) and are anaemic, with no iron or minerals in their diet. "Welfare standards on the continent are just not as high as ours," says Browning, whose veal calves, by contrast, are allowed to roam free in the summer months, and are given hay and oats to eat in their communal sheds through the winter. They are often even settled with surrogate mothers - cows who are retired from the dairy - and generally have a pretty good time of it until they're about six months old and their number's up.
Although Browning, whose produce is available online (helenbrowningorganics.co.uk), has big growth plans for the future, at the moment she is only producing about 40 veal calves a year, which isn't going to meet any nationwide run on domestic veal. But help is coming from the award-winning Ginger Pig farm and butchers. Proprietor Tim Wilson says, "We're working on it - literally building the sheds as we speak." He goes on to warn, however, that because of the increase in demand for goat's milk, the same wasteful cycle could occur with them. "There are farms just down the road from me killing [and disposing of] the kids at a day or two old, then down at Smithfield's you see imported French milk-fed billy goats." Here we go again.
For veal, though, it does seem that change is a-hoof. British meat now accounts for around 60% of the veal that Waitrose sells (escalopes currently retailing at £23 per kilo). But so far it doesn't seem to be trickling down to the market and the restaurants. My local and very good butcher John Stenton says that veal is the only imported meat he stocks. "We sell very little veal, and it's all Dutch. I used to have a source in Cornwall but they dried up. You just can't seem to get hold of welfare-reared meat in the UK." Danny Lidgate of London uber-butchers, Lidgates, has had a little more luck. "We get some British veal, but milk-fed Dutch veal tends to be a higher standard because it's produced on a bigger scale and it's more readily available. However, we have just started selling British organic veal which is starting to become more available. It is very popular, good quality and slightly redder than the imported meat."
For Rose Gray of the River Cafe, it's a question of quality. "In the past, we've used both French and Dutch veal," she says, "but I've never come across a British veal good enough to use in our restaurant. It just has no flavour, no texture and not enough fat - the fat is important. Maybe [quality British veal] is out there, but I've never tasted it."
Having cooked and eaten Browning's veal, I find it has more flavour than the usual pale version; all the delicateness of its continental counterpart and is just as tender. I believe that, ethics aside, when it comes to animals, taste is defined by life: what it ate and how it moved. As happy calves move around, they grow muscle, and giving them a balanced diet provides their bodies with what they need to get stronger - as nature intended. These differences produce a meat with a pinker tinge to it, which is known in the industry as "rose veal".
Despite my name (Allegra), there's no Italian blood in my body, but my love of Italian food is written on my bones. Along with garlic, tomatoes, parmesan and a bunch of other super-special Italian cookery staples, veal sits at the high table of Italian ingredients; I adore this unique flesh in all of the many dishes it appears in, such as vitello tonnato and involtini of spinach, mozzarella and grilled aubergines, saltimbocca alla romana (pan fried with parma ham and sage), scaloppine al burro e salvia (escalope cooked with butter and sage) and costoletta alla milanese (pan-fried in breadcrumbs). I have even cited osso buco (shin steak, including the bone and marrow, braised very slowly with vegetables, tomatoes, white wine and herbs) as being my death row meal.
· Allegra McEvedy is co-founder of the fast-food chain Leon. Her cookbook is published by Kyle Cathie at £19.99. To order a copy for £18.99 with free UK p&p, call 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop.
Ask Allegra at blogs.guardian.co.uk/food
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