Butcher’s beef with BOSH!

Issue 13 | Autumn 2023

SIMON TAYLOR is one of the country’s leading butchers, as well as a top live-fire cook. Who better to review a book all about meat? Except, it’s not.

Simon Taylor

Let’s start with a beef tomato. This name comes from the fact that the larger, sturdier tomato cuts like a firm steak.

This of course makes sense to us and is not suggesting the tomato itself will taste like a piece of beef. The dishes in BOSH! MEAT are doubtless delicious and great effort has gone into the recipe creation. However, and I think we all knew the ‘however’ was coming from a butcher.

I would not try and tell you I have created a meat-based dish to taste like vegetables and call a chicken a cabbage.

The reason for this is simple: Meat, and indeed vegetables, are great in their own right. You may choose not to eat one or the other, but if you are craving the flavour of these fantastic ingredients perhaps it’s more a case of how these ingredients came to be.

I will never debate anyone’s moral choices; we must understand though, these choices come with a cost. If I was to decide I would never again eat a hispi cabbage, I would simply have to accept the fact I would never again truly enjoy the sweet caramelisation of this beautiful vegetable when charred over hot coals.

The same of course goes for cutting out meat, and its certainly not the dishes in this book I disagree with; my beef is their titles.

For me an angle here is once again the demonisation of meat; the thought that all meat is bad. This is something I will always challenge.

If you have chosen not to eat meat for environmental reasons, then I urge you to take a close look at well-raised local meats and the regenerative effect they can have on our land.

BOSH! points out that we live in a world looking for answers about our future and the future of our planet. I wholeheartedly agree. But if we really look into this, it’s our soil we must protect, the real, literal root of it all.

When we do this, we of course can hold both meat and plant-based foods in contempt; it is the way we produce food, not one or the other, we must be educated about.

In fact, when we champion a pasture-based, carbon-sequestering, biodiversity-supporting way of living and eating, we will indeed find both meat and plant products being available in a regenerative circular system.

Why is meat often seen as such a negative for the planet? First, look at the right kind of meat and perhaps use it a little better, a little less often and maybe a little less in portion size. Second, when we buy pasture-based meat we can argue our purchase is not just carbon neutral but regenerative.

Take a local minced beef burger purchased from my shop. Ingredients: beef. One product, one carbon footprint (a regenerative footprint).

BOSH! beef*. Ingredients: I would list them all but there are around 20 for their steak.

Now in isolation they are not bad ingredients, but you must remember each ingredient has a carbon footprint of its own – food miles, production, packaging and so on. I am not sure you could source any of these locally, with the exception of water.

If you have chosen to opt out of meat because of welfare, then again, I ask you to look at better meat, not the production of all meat and indeed, again, look at the production of plant-based foods while you are at it.

We are fortunate that the UK has fantastic welfare standards as a base. Moving on from there you can find naturally farmed, free range and best of all wild protein, if this is your choice within these sustainable regenerative agriculture systems.

This leads into nutrition. All foods farmed or encouraged under a biodiverse system are more nutritional in their natural state, which makes the labelling of processed vegetables as meat a problem.

The reason I say this is that meat, red meat in particular, is one of the most nutrient dense food sources on the planet. Beef for example is a great source of vitamins and minerals including B2, B3, B6, B12 and zinc. More to the point, some of these, like haem iron, are much more bio-available to us compared to those found in plant foods.

I do believe Henry Firth and Ian Theasby have written a good book here; I just take issue with the titles.

There are some great dishes that will make brilliant alternatives for those who choose it, with some top advice about checking labelling and really trying to find out what your food’s impact really has on you and the world.

I’d like to think I would buy this book, as vegetables should be championed and they have every right to be on my grill alongside a good piece of meat.

But I’d credit the ingredients that make the dishes, rather than the imaginary missing ingredient they are trying to be.

Simon Taylor was captain of Team GB at the World Butchers Challenge in the USA last year. He runs Surrey Hills Butchers.