FLU OVER the COOK-CHILL NEST

On Friday’s Any Questions, the first question was: “Will you be buying any Bernard Matthews products this weekend?” My answer would be “no” but it would be “no” any weekend.

Even if we remove the unappetizing ingredient of Bernard Matthews from the question, I would not be buying turkey. It’s the fowl with the least going for it. Unless prepared by a cook of experience, skill and imagination, turkey is the driest, least flavoursome meat in the whole field of fowl or game. How it has become all but de rigueur for the Christmas table I do not understand. Our Christmas Day bird of choice is goose so, apart from the delicious flavour of the meat, we have a vast residue of fat for many kinds of kitchen purposes over several months thereafter. If the festive meal brings a big turnout of guests, then it’s rib of beef.

On those Christmas Days when we are guests elsewhere and turkey is unavoidable, I make up with Brussels sprouts which, according to the urban myth, everybody loathes but which I have adored since a much reminisced-upon occasion in my toddlerhood when I evidently polished off at least a dozen sprouts. Perhaps everyone else hates sprouts because they only ever eat them overcooked but all vegetables are spoiled by cooking until they are soggy.

The Bernard Matthews “product” would be no more acceptable if it were quail or lobster or truffles. Matthews’ turkeys spend a miserable existence crammed into maximum security blocks, fed on chemical slurry, standing (they have insufficient room to sit) in their own faeces and never seeing the light of day or even seeing their fellows in plain sight. After slaughtering, they are bulked up with water, preserved with chemical additives and rendered into various gimmicky presentational modes (e.g. “twizzlers”) wherein, their lack of flavour masked with monosodium glutamate, they are sold to shoppers who do not have the wit to tell their children that they will eat proper food whether they think they like it or not.

When Mr Matthews says his processed foods are “bootiful”, what he means is that he has made a great deal of booty from them. He has plundered the housewife’s purse and the househusband’s wallet on the pretext that his brutal methods have enhanced rather than destroyed any residual flavour in the poultry he processes. His is the type of processed food in this country, the adulterated, over-packaged offal that claims to take the “inconvenience” out of cooking. To maximize his profits, the miserable creatures that provide the modicum of flesh for his products pass abbreviated lives in factory conditions, conditions which we now know are no guarantee against avian flu. Hardly surprising, when the fowl have no chance to run free or flap their wings or build any kind of immunity against opportunist infection that would of course spread quickly through the insanitary conditions in which the birds exist.

Matthews has only made his pile because shoppers are so stupid. If we all gave up our addiction to cook-chill and other “convenience” food and instead bought proper organic foodstuffs and meat and eggs from free-range flocks, the birds themselves would be at far less risk of disease and so would the public.