Thu, Feb-13-20, 01:39
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Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/153/160
BF:
Progress: 109%
Location: UK
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The man who became a butcher after 25 years as a vegetarian
What’s his beef? The man who became a butcher after 25 years as a vegetarian
British farmers aren’t the only ones who have turned against a plant-based diet. Glen Burrows says that eating meat again restored his health, and now he’s selling it
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...arian-78wl5l9lj
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In recent years the dietary traffic all seems to have gone in one direction. The notion that the only way to secure your health and that of our planet is to give up meat has passed from quackery to orthodoxy. If you say that you are vegetarian you are no longer met with jokes about brown rice and open-toed sandals, but offers of pea-protein burgers and oat-milk lattes. It’s the committed carnivore who is beginning to feel like the endangered species.
Yesterday at a conference in London British farmers railed against the prevailing mood by wheeling out academics and scientists who argued that tofu had a worse impact on global warming than consuming lamb, pork and chicken, and that a meat-free diet could be unhealthy.
This comes as no surprise to Glen Burrows. For 25 years he was a strict vegetarian, happy in his world of nut roasts and lentil stews, no meat or fish passing his lips. Then one day, after a particularly satisfying encounter with a plate of grilled lamb’s liver, he fell off the wagon in spectacular fashion, going from vegetarian to paleo and eating meat every day. This week, to cap it all, he has opened a butchery business. Talk about going the whole hog.
Sitting in his home in northwest London, the trim, youthful-looking 48-year-old photographer and film-maker recalls his Damascene conversion. “I experienced a level of satiety and thankfulness after that meal that I couldn’t even describe on a vegetarian diet,” he says. “I was high on meat — there’s no other way to put it. I remember sitting in the living room and I was physically vibrating. It was like I’d done drugs, and nothing I’d had in the past 25 years had come anywhere near to that.
“When you are a vegetarian, people say you won’t be able to eat meat again because your stomach will react and you won’t be able to digest it. My experience of that is complete nonsense. I had no trouble at all.”
The impulse to change came from his wife, Andrea, also a vegetarian, who was suffering from adrenal fatigue after the birth of their second child and introduced meat into her diet on the advice of a naturopath.
“She cooked some bacon and I was completely put off by it, but I saw this incredible transformation in her. Within two weeks she went from being an exhausted zombie to someone full of energy. The spark came back in her eyes.”
So he wondered if meat might have an equally transformative effect on his health. “I didn’t realise how unhealthy I’d become until I became healthy again. It was like a light switched on in my head. I was suffering from auto-immune issues, for example brain fog that felt like being half-stoned all the time and I couldn’t snap out of it. All of that disappeared almost overnight.”
Now he says he follows a largely paleo diet, the so-called hunter-gatherer diet of meat, fish, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds, the kind of foods our cavemen forefathers would have foraged. He doesn’t miss the lentils and pulses — they used to leave him feeling bloated anyway — but it was finding the kind of meat he could eat with a clear conscience that was the problem.
It’s hard to argue that most of the world’s meat production isn’t still deeply problematic from an animal welfare, environmental and sustainability viewpoint. It is said to take 20,000 litres of water and up to 7kg of (fossil-fuel-fertilised and pesticide-sprayed) grain to produce 1kg of beef, and the circle of destruction that feeds growing demand plays out like some baleful nursery rhyme of self-enacting Armageddon: this is the tree that will be chopped down to grow the grain that needs the water to feed the cow that produces the carbon dioxide that needs the tree to clean the air to nourish the soil that grows the grain . . .
So Burrows set about finding the healthiest, happiest, most environmentally friendly meat he could lay his hands on, and the Ethical Butcher was born. “It exists because I wanted to be its customer,” he says. Alongside the meat trader Farshad Kazemian, he sources meat from 18 farms around the country that put animal welfare and the environment at the heart of what they do. In rain-swept, pasture-rich Britain the first requisite is that the animals are 100 per cent grass-fed, something that very little beef is.
“We have a very good climate for grazing animals on grass, and to us it makes no sense to keep a cow in one field where it can eat the grass, and grow grain in another field to feed it. You are creating a totally unnecessary carbon footprint,” Burrows says.
As well as the environmental benefit (no pesticides, no chemical fertilisers, no genetically modified soya), it is also known to produce meat that is higher in omega 3, the essential fat that is under-represented in our diets.
Furthermore, their farmers practise “regenerative” agriculture, which focuses on naturally regenerating the topsoil and increasing biodiversity. “This is the bit we are most excited about and really might change the world and how people view eating meat,” Burrows says.
By changing the grazing patterns to mimic how livestock would feed in the wild, moving daily in a tight pack to feed on fresh land, farms can be carbon neutral, he claims. Indeed, studies of White Oak Pastures in Georgia in the US, suggests it can even be carbon negative. Cows will urinate and defecate and trample seeds and pods back into the soil and move on. “So by the time they return to the same land maybe 60 days later, there’s been an incredible growth spurt and all the extra plant growth puts carbon back into the soil, and the increase in bacteria consumes methane from the air and you improve the structure of the soil so it becomes more sponge-like, making the land both drought and flood-resistant.”
The same logic can be applied not just to cows, but sheep and poultry too. The Ethical Butcher’s chicken and turkey supplier keeps her birds in an old Bedford van at night and every morning drives them to a different part of the farm to forage and scratch in the woodland.
There’s a cost to all this, obviously. Burrows says his prices are about 20 per cent above Waitrose organic and accepts that his meat can be criticised as an elitist, middle-class product. A large chicken is £18.50, beef mince about £13 a kg and a leg of lamb about £40. “But it hasn’t got to be fillet steak every night. The mince comes from the same incredible grass-fed high-welfare animal and has same nutritional profile as a ribeye steak.”
Tastewise, there is no comparison. He gave me a ribeye steak to try, a Dexter longhorn cross from Jane’s Farm in Cheshire, and it was as fine a piece of meat as I’ve had, the fat as golden and sweet as toffee and the marbled flesh rich with the flavour of clover. There was none of the metallic sourness you sometimes find. A rack of lamb, while double the price of a similar rack of New Zealand lamb at Sainsbury’s, was similarly revelatory.
“We’re calling it the craft meat revolution. We want people to stop seeing meat as a generic product. Longhorn in Oxfordshire will be different to Longhorn in Northumberland according to the pasture the animal has been kept on. There can be up to 300 different herbs and grasses in it, anything from clover to chickweed and sage.”
His favourite cut so far was a sirloin steak from Anna Blumfield’s farm in Essex, which he says tasted almost like a sweet, floral matcha tea. “She used to be a sports nutritionist and keeps improving her cows’ diets, sending her steaks to the labs for full nutritional testing. The last batch was so full of omega 3 its profile was closer to wild salmon than to grain-fed beef. It’s as good for you as beef can be.”
Whether you can afford to eat such meat or not, I would encourage you to visit the Ethical Butcher website. Burrows has made a short film profiling all his suppliers and it is humbling and inspiring to see the farmers’ passion and commitment to the welfare of their animals and their environment. They have been cast as the villains for too long, and it’s important to see how they can be the planet’s saviours as well.
Take Michael Harding, who farms 100 acres in East Sussex in the most biodiverse and sustainable way he can. He grazes his cows in broadleaf woodland created by his father, is planting in his pastures a grove of walnut trees that won’t produce a crop for 15 years and plans over the next two years to plant four miles of hedgerow to create the small fields that holistic grazing require.
When he describes how he ends up selling much of his meat through the supermarkets to end up in processed food, you can almost see the tears in his eyes. “People don’t know what they are getting, and it’s quite a disappointment to me that my message and the quality of my product isn’t getting through.”
ethicalbutcher.co.uk
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