In November 2009, I lost my temper in front of a bank of television cameras in a way I have never done before or since. I was in Los Angeles working as a judge on the second season of the American TV series, Top Chef Masters. For the final, the three remaining competitors had been asked to cook a?series of dishes that told their story: their first food experiences, where they are now, where they are going and the like. For the dish that defined where he was going, the famed Las Vegas-based chef Rick Moonen had cooked a venison dish, using meat imported from New Zealand.
This was baffling. Throughout the competition Moonen had described himself as "the fish guy". He was also "the sustainability guy". He cared about the planet, he told us day after day in the competition. I can't pretend. I had not warmed to the man. The sustainability guy? His flagship restaurant was in Las Vegas, one of the least sustainable cities on the face of the planet. I had no doubt he sourced his ingredients sustainably, but just being in Las Vegas, a city that gulped water and petrochemicals like they were going out of fashion (they are), was in itself an unsustainable act. And now here was the fish guy, the sustainability guy, announcing that he had used meat imported from halfway across the world. When he was in front of us I asked him some pointed questions. Once the competitors were gone, and we were deliberating, I let rip.
I shouted. I raged. Veins bulged.
HAD THE MAN NEVER HEARD OF THE BLOODY CONCEPT OF FOOD MILES?
The producers saved me from myself. They included none of my rant in the final edit. I?made up for it once that episode had aired, by writing a piece for this newspaper explaining my fury. Moonen responded online by calling me out; the venison had arrived in LA by sea, he said. It was fully sustainable. His supporters in Vegas alleged I had robbed their man of the prize. I can say firmly that the Kiwi venison was not why Moonen lost. The cooking by Marcus Samuelsson, an Ethiopian-born chef adopted and raised by a Swedish couple before making his name in the US, was so much better. Samuelsson deserved to win. But Moonen and his well-travelled bambi did himself no favours.
Cut to three years later and I am reading an academic paper with a very snappy title: Food Miles – Comparative Energy/Emissions Performance of New Zealand's Agriculture Industry by Caroline Saunders, Andrew Barber and Greg Taylor. I'm citing the full title so you can look it up, and you may want to. It's not a?breezy read, but it is an important one. At the very least it requires me to apologise to Rick Moonen. Having read it I can now say that while it's in no way certain it is possible venison raised in New Zealand and shipped to California could well be more sustainable than the alternatives in California. At least he deserves the benefit of the doubt.
Sorry Mr Moonen. I'm still not a fan and it really doesn't change the result of the contest. There were three other judges. But on this point it looks like he may have been right and I?may have been wrong.
Because, according to this exceptionally detailed study from 2006, lamb, apples and dairy produced in New Zealand and shipped to Britain have a smaller carbon footprint than the equivalent products produced in Britain. To be exact, the UK uses twice as much carbon per tonne of milk solids produced as New Zealand, and four times the amount as New Zealand for lamb. I was so baffled by the report I wanted to know whether I had read it correctly. I emailed Tim Benton, professor of population ecology at Leeds University who is also the "UK Champion for Global Food Security", charged with co-ordinating work on the subject between research councils and government departments. He truly understands both the global food challenges that we face and what sustainable intensification means. He had been an invaluable source of academic papers and scholarly advice for my investigation into the challenges of food security from the very start. I wanted to know whether the report was simply a function of the New Zealand agriculture sector attempting to protect its commercial interests by ferociously massaging some numbers.
He threw in some caveats but, he said: "The overall picture is probably true."
For me it was the final nail in the coffin of localism. Then again I'd been listening to the hammering for months.
In the late 90s, when the term "food miles" was first coined by Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, it was a vital and important part of the debate on how our food system worked. It was a simple and easily understandable notion: the further your food travelled from point of production to point of retail the worse for the environment it was, by dint of the amount of fuel that journey took. It was that simplicity which made it a rallying cry for food campaigners across the developed world. Here, finally, was a tangible way in which to describe what was wrong with our food system. It also gave environmentally minded consumers a simple way to judge whether they should buy a product. Had it come from as close by as possible? If yes, then into the basket it went.
The problem is it's far too simple. Looking only at transport costs for your food is not just to miss the bigger picture, it's to miss the picture entirely. The only way you can get some sense of the footprint of your food is by using what's called a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), which brings everything about the production of that item into play: the petrochemicals used in farming and in fertilisers, the energy to build tractors as well as to run them, to erect farm buildings and fences, and all of that has to be measured against yield. It's about emissions per tonne of apples or lamb. The New Zealand report used nearly 30 different measures in its LCA. And it's when you start drilling down on those that the point is quickly made.
Using a wide sample of apple farms both in the UK and New Zealand, the researchers found that the actual weight of nitrogen fertiliser used was roughly similar in both countries (80kg per hectare in NZ to 78kg in the UK). However, in New Zealand they were getting a yield of 50 tonnes per hectare, as against 14 tonnes in Britain. Where lamb was concerned yield was higher in the UK than New Zealand, but so was nitrogen fertiliser use by a factor of more than 13. New Zealand simply has a better landscape and climate for rearing lamb and apples. Of course, as Professor Benton pointed out to me, some of these figures may be out of date – but not by much. There are also endless arguments about what things ought to be measured and what ought not to be measured. But even if it is the most extreme example, it makes its point.
Jan Kees Vis, global director of sustainable sourcing development at Unilever in the Netherlands, has overseen research which puts the proportion of the global carbon footprint of your food as a result of its transportation at 2-3%. Not convinced? After all, Unilever would have rather more than a small vested interest in this. Fair enough. Look instead at the detailed and independent study by Christopher Weber and H Scott Matthews from Carnegie Mellon University from 2008. They put it at 4%. Or as Professor Benton put it to me, "If you want to wipe out all the food miles in what you eat, all you need do is swap one day's red-meat eating a week to white meat. Not even to a vegetarian diet. Just to white meat."
There's an awful lot of research to back this up, showing how just how much extra land you would need if food production moved from where it is now, to be conveniently close to you so you could feel good about your food miles. But even I would find that tedious.
So, instead, come with me briefly to the fens of Lincolnshire. Generally I hate flat places. They sap the will, drain away ambition. But I'll put up with it to make a killer point about comparative advantage in agriculture. If you look at a map of potato growing in Britain you'll quickly see that it's concentrated here on the flat expanses around King's Lynn and the Scottish borders. It's no accident, as potato farmer Bill Legge explains to me while he gives me a tour of his fields, hemmed in on each side by the grassy banks that keep the waters at bay. Legge has been farming potatoes around here all his life, on land which was under water until the 17th century. "It's peat soil here so we need to use less in the way of nitrogen fertilisers," he says. Not only that. This dark loose soil is good for the harvesting of potatoes. "Here, we get about 20 tonnes of potatoes an acre," Bill tells me.
So how about if potato production was moved closer to the capital? After all there are more people living in London than, say, King's Lynn. "Well it's a clay soil there and it's not as productive. Plus, it's bloody hard to harvest them from the solid clod."
How much less productive is it?
"You'd get 16 tonnes an acre there."
So the yield would be 20% less. In other words, to get the same amount of potatoes to grow local to London you would need 20% more land. Or you'd have to bombard that land with huge doses of fertilisers. Either way the footprint of your potatoes would be bigger. That's why they are grown in Lincolnshire and not in Essex.
Of course, if you live in Lincolnshire that's where you should get your potatoes from. They're local to you. They are the most sustainable option. Look, I never said this was simple. It's anything but. Just as food miles made everything too simple, the end of food miles as a single measure makes everything very complicated. And let me make it a little more complicated: there are other good reasons for buying local food which have nothing to do with sustainability. It can be great for rural economies and viable rural economies can be good for communities. But if you get caught in the corner of the supermarket by some goggle-eyed food-warrior examining the contents of your basket for signs of food-mile transgression you can tell them that I said they should sod off. Go on. Have a practice. Shout at the mirror. It feels good, doesn't it?
It should be obvious by now that all of this also applies to issues around seasonality. The argument has long worked like this: if an ingredient is available out of season it must have been grown somewhere far away. Therefore, by dint of the miles it has travelled, it is unsustainable. But this may well not be the case.
A strawberry ripened beneath the winter sun of Morocco can have a smaller carbon footprint than one raised in a polytunnel at the height of a so-called British summer. You can make lots of arguments about seasonal British strawberries tasting nicer. That's purely about aesthetics. You can, I suppose, also argue it's healthier for our food culture if we only eat with the seasons – though in an globalised world, where we happily consume film, music, television and books from all corners of the globe, the argument does not exactly have legs of steel. What you can't immediately assume is that it's the less sustainable option. Explaining this to people who have built entire patterns of behaviour around the idea of seasonality is tough. Nevertheless, they do need to be told.
"We want to eat meat, but we want no part in what obtaining that meat requires. We turn away from it": Jay Rayner at John Penny slaughter house in Leeds. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Observer It is early on a Monday morning. I have been put to work on the pig tank and I'm trying hard to regulate my breathing to deal with the sensory overload. Danny and Alan, the two blokes I'm working with – and they are blokes; lean and hard-bodied and sinewy, with a clench-jawed sense of purpose – are getting on with it. They are doing the thing. They do this thing every day, sometimes for six or seven hours and I can't quite imagine how. For all the extra weight I carry I am fit, as a result of a gym habit. I am probably fitter than I have ever been in my life, but I am genuinely afraid that this job on the pig tank will defeat me; that I will crumple at the knees and disgrace myself, overcome by the noise and the smell and the heat and the sheer relentless heft of it all.
I am intimidated.
The morning started for me not long after 6am and I had already thought it had been full on. I am in the abattoir of John Penny and Sons in Rawdon, that part of Leeds where it bows its head to the smudge of Bradford just over the hill. J Penny is a rare business, an integrated beef farm, slaughter house and butchers, famed not just for sending some of the highest quality meat to market, but for its complete openness. The slaughterhouse industry in Britain – the world over – is notoriously secretive, and unsurprisingly so. Animal-welfare campaigners can and have made their lives very difficult, and with good reason; the worst abuses of animals at the moment of death have generally been identified by exceptionally brave campaigners, who have made it their job to record the suffering – let's call it torture, which is what it is – perpetrated by people to whom we have delegated power.
For that is the reality. We want to eat meat but we want to have no part in what obtaining that meat requires. We turn away from it. We ask others to perform that role for us and we do not look. While the BSE crisis of the 1990s vastly overhauled the regulation and oversight of abattoirs in Britain, they still remain very wary of any outside examination by the media. They don't generally let people in. The current Penny in charge of this business, John, believes in letting people in. He's a big solid, Yorkshireman who keeps his hair buzz-cut short, as if it to save time. "We have nothing to hide," he tells me. "Look at everything."
The beef animals they raise travel only a matter of metres from the farm down the hill to slaughter, which reduces the levels of stress. They also slaughter for other farmers, but their livestock travels from pretty close by in Yorkshire. And it's small. In a month, J Penny will slaughter around 2,000 sheep, 6,000 pigs and 1,000 cattle. There are industrial-scale abattoirs in the US which kill 5,000 cattle in a day. There are records showing the Penny family have been farming around these parts since the end of the 18th century. Certainly they've been on this site since 1891, opening the first abattoir here in 1938.
Now I was to work there. To really understand what was going on, to understand the relationship between ourselves and our once-sentient dinner, I felt I had to go for long-term exposure. I had to be there for long enough to be inured to what was happening around me. John Penny agreed that I could come for a couple of days, that they would put me to work on whatever unskilled tasks there were.
And so early one morning in summer I turn up at the site and am invited to follow a herd of sheep through what are called "the layers" – the shed of holding zones, separated out by clanking metal gates. As the gate in front opens to let through the flock, the one behind closes, in a continuous corridor that snakes back on itself as it rises up the concrete incline, bringing the animals ever closer to the point of slaughter.
Clive, a former butcher who now runs the slaughterhouse, leads me to a spot just above the chamber at the start of what is called the "kill line". There, a young man by the name of Josh – "They call me the special one," he says with a grin, when we are introduced – would be using a pair of huge electrified paddles shaped like tongs to stun the sheep.
"It's only Josh's mum who calls him the special one," Clive says, with a shake of the head.
The sheep are let into the room in batches of eight or so, a hatch clattering shut behind them as they enter. Josh positions himself with his legs either side of a sheep's hind quarters. He presses the paddles to the side of the head and down they go, unconscious. Running over Josh's head is a long continuous rail, from which hangs a set of chains. He hooks one of these to the animal's front leg and it's lifted up so that it is dangling, head to the ceiling.
It moves down the line to where an older man in a plastic apron is waiting, the sticking knife in his hand. Allan, coming up for 65 and retirement, has been here most of his working life. He is grey and solid and a little round at the belly, where the apron bows. He grabs hold of the sheep as it passes and shoves the blade in below the ear to sever the artery. There is a?quick but contained spray of blood. The animal twitches. It is done.
"The pigs twitch even more than the sheep," Clive says to me, as we stand there watching.
Josh stuns another sheep. "That's a perfect stun, that is," Clive says. "Front legs out, back legs in."
I say to Josh, who is in his 20s, "How long have you done this?"
"It's the only job I've ever done," he says.
"Why?"
He shrugs. "They offered me the job." He stuns another sheep and it passes onwards to Allan.
As we talk, the sheep keep coming through. Josh keeps stunning. Allan keeps sticking. I am staring down a white-painted corridor, its walls sprayed with blood. At the end, the rail turns, taking the dead sheep to a long line of men each with a different task: the sheep will be beheaded, skinned, disembowelled, the bodies sawn in half. All of those men are waiting. We can chat but the work must not be stopped. There are 700 sheep to come through here.
I ask Clive if they have to look carefully at the type of people they employ.
"Of course," he says. "You get some. You see if they're getting something out of the experience they shouldn't." They are taken off the job. That said, he refuses to deny how the kill line can make you feel. "No mistake. It gives you a sense of power doing this. You see a big animal and realise how easy it is to put them down." He does not say this boastfully or with enthusiasm. He says it with the thoughtfulness of a man who has been in the trade all his life, who knows there are certain facts of life that must not be avoided. We watch the sheep dying for around half an hour. It stops being quite as dramatic as it was at first. There is a rhythm. But it does not stop being compelling.
This is life, halted.
The sheep are through and it is time for the pigs. Clive invites me to work on the tank and I know I can't decline. This is what I am here for. It is a tank of hot water – 62C – around 20ft long, 4ft deep and 10ft across. Behind the wall at our backs, in the kill-line corridor, the pigs are being stuck by Allan. I can hear the noise of them squealing and grunting in the holding area before they receive the stun from the electric paddles. I can hear the chains clanking. At one point I look around the wall and see the slaughterman. Our eyes meet. He is weary.
With the sheep, Allan was merely a little splattered. Now he is drenched. He is covered in blood, from his ankles right up to the transparent visor of his face mask. It is everywhere, and the pigs continue to bleed out as they come round the corner, a huge swirling scarlet tide. As they get to us, one of my colleagues lifts a handle which in turn lifts an articulated section of the overhead line. He can now lift the pigs up and over the lip of the tank so he can deposit them into the water with a huge splash. There is the smell of fresh blood and the tang of urine and shit and, above the top of it all, something familiar which I eventually identify as pork stock. Which is what happens when you dunk just-dead pigs in hot water.
When the pigs hit the water our job is to grab hold of the chains around their legs, three or four at a time, and hook the end over the side of the tank so the bodies aren't lost to the depths. Then we must drag the animals down the length of the tank, heaving them against the fluid tension, straining to get them moving. Danny, working alongside me, is short and wiry and prefers to push the chains down; I prefer to use my weight to pull, but sometimes find my feet slipping on the wet concrete floor. Then again I am trying to move around 300kg of pig at a time. Waiting at the end is the bristling machine. We push them through the water on to the platform which raises them out of the water into an open-sided chamber. There, they are flailed by furiously rotating rubber paddles with metal teeth at the end that strip off any hair and, while they're at it, toenails, too. Every minute or so there is a searing burst of violent flame designed to finish the job. Finally they are spat out the other end, re-chained and sent off down the line.
It is 90 minutes of pig drama, as scripted by Hieronymus Bosch. There's the stench and the splash of the hot water and the drag of the pigs. There's the roar of the machine and the heat of the belching flame. And over the top is the noise of the animals and the splatter and spray of the blood that cannot help but get you. Occasionally an animal comes round that is twitching more than the others and Danny takes a knife to them to check they are properly gone, hunkering down under the gush of something hot and arterial to finish the job as quickly as possible. And, of course, it is continuous.
I do what I can to keep up, to not be a hindrance. Occasionally I lose a?pig to the water and somebody has to come to my aid to retrieve it from beneath the surface. I feel ashamed and literally unmanned. I am a writer. I sit at my desk. I type. I have never done anything that feels remotely male. I feel I am failing. And then I?feel ashamed, not for trying to measure myself in this way, but for thinking like this when really what's going on around me, the deaths of pigs to feed my own intense pork habit, is so much more important.
Then there is the strain. I feel the effort in the core of my abdomen and in my arms and in my neck. I feel it everywhere. And when, after 90 minutes or so, Clive invites me to try my hand at something else, I grab the chance, reasoning that I have to do as much as possible while I am here. I leave Danny and Alan to it. I am happy to say goodbye.
A Greedy Man in a Hungry World, by Jay Rayner, is out now at ￡12.99. To order a copy for ￡10.39, with free UK p&p, click here or call 0330 333 6846
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