Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
a pathetic 250 grams of offal. Probably most offal eaters are now over the age of 60.
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However chefs such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver are now propagating
the virtues of 'the fifth quarter', so we may see the decline in offal consumption reversed.
In the days when there were still horse-drawn rag and bone men providing a door-to-
door recycling service, my mother used to boil up beef or chicken bones and scraps for
stock which became the foundation for a quality of soup that many people under the age of
40 have never tasted. It is not hard to find stories about impoverished 18th or 19th century
families who supplemented their vegetable ration with a few bones or scraps. By comparis-
on to what landowners were eating, of course, this gruel appears pitiful; but assuming that
there were enough dried peas, onions, potatoes and carrots and so on, there is no reason it
should be any different from the excellent split pea and meat stock soup that my mother
served me. This is exactly the sort of dish that vegans claim we should now be living from
- except that the added benefit of meatstock or scraps increases palatability, whilst impos-
ing a minute environmental toll. Much of this low grade meat, which would no doubt be
welcomed by the hungry of the world, currently ends up in pet food. Go to any slaughter-
house in the UK and you will see huge vats full of beef-fat waiting to be incinerated. But
in posh delicatessens you can also find liquid stock, emulating the kind my mother made,
for sale in jars; and there are still a few of us who buy dripping from the butchers.
What is the ecologic value of all these byproducts? It is not particularly helpful to com-
pare the protein or energy content of a cow's hide, tallow, pancreas etc, with the protein and
energy in the parts that we eat. However, about two thirds of the 45 per cent of a cow which
is officially human-inedible can be rendered and fed to pigs at a conversion rate of around
4:1 (or to fish even more efficiently) and that alone suggests that the feed conversion ratio
for beef should be reduced by one sixth. By placing a ban on the rendering of animal car-
cases, the EU has managed to turn a valuable resource into a disposal problem, but that is
a matter I discuss in Chapter 5.
The only other guide to go by is their economic value, which is subject to political and
economic influences. According to a UK Monopolies and Mergers Commission report, up
until the 1970s, the byproducts of a beef carcase paid for the slaughtering costs (which
in the 1980s were around eight per cent of the value of the animal) plus the profits, so a
slaughterhouse could sell the dressed carcase of a beef cow for the same price that it bought
the animal. However, 'the balance became unsettled towards the end of the 1970s', presum-
ably because alternative products derived from oil, or from imports such as palm oil, were
undercutting the market: by 1981 byproducts only brought in 3.5 per cent of the value of the
we prefer our soap and cooking fat to be made of vegetable oil.
The hide represents seven per cent of the weight of the carcase, and even today, when
we could if we wanted manufacture all our leather products out of materials, its value when
