Know where it comes from

I am an omnivore and always will be. However, there are two distinct caveats I now apply to the meat I do eat. First, how much have I been eating recently and second, where does it come from.

When I was brought up, most people had meat with nearly every meal. The Sunday roast was a British staple in virtually every household. Meat for sandwiches, again something I ate virtually every day, was of the highly processed variety. The result was a very unhealthy diet that led to problems with the digestive system at best and high levels of cancer at worst. For me, when I was in charge of my own kitchen I initially followed that pattern. However, I was lucky enough to go to Japan and find a completely different and much healthier vegetable based diet. Once I had got used to it, and I had three years over there to do so, I couldn’t go back to the meat heavy diet of my childhood and early adulthood ever again. Nowadays, we keep our meat intake as low as possible with, in an average week, meat featuring two or three times in our meals.

When times were tougher, money wise, we bought the cheapest meat, which contained poor quality ingredients and which were not manufactured with any interest in animal welfare at any level. The first thing I was able to change was to get free range eggs rather than caged eggs. Even when I did that, and I was an early adopter, I felt like I was taking advantage of poor practices and eating meat that wasn’t produced according to the principles I wanted to follow. So we cut back on meat until we could start to adhere to those principles. Now, every meat product we buy has to have minimum levels of animal welfare. What if we couldn’t afford it? We left the poor animal welfare product on the shelf and looked for a meat free alternative. I would love for everyone who is in a similar situation to me to do so as well.

Just a quick advert if I may! It is now December 1 and I am writing a series of posts for Blogmas featuring a number of Christmas Magazines from 1896 to 2025. If you love popular culture or social and cultural history I really think you will enjoy these articles. Today we go back to 1896.

https://davidgpearce205.blog/2025/12/01/christmas-magazines-through-the-years-pears-annual-1896/