A lot of my life as a chef has been devoted to thinking about the ethical issues that face our profession, and to trying to do something practical about them by carefully examining what we buy for Le Manoir. This even applies to something as humble as milk.In America most beef cattle were long ago taken away from their traditional pastures and instead fed grain, mostly maize, in industrial feed-lots. The same thing has happened with dairy cattle, for the simple economic reason that America overproduces maize. Now some dairy farmers in Nocton, Lincolnshire want to do something similar, and they applied for planning permission to build a mega-dairy with herds up to 30 times bigger than the average British herd.
Their claim is that this will help "food security" because of its huge production - each of the 3,770 cows yielding 58 pints a day - and will be environmentally friendly. The idea of this is that the cereal feed will be grown locally and the manure spread on local fields, reducing the need for chemical fertilisers, etc. Plans to keep the beasts indoors for their entire lives have now been shelved because of animal welfare protests, and it is now intended to allow them at least to take some exercise.
However, the economic impetus for British superdairies may have disappeared, as on 18 November the Independent reported that all the leading supermarkets except Morrisons and Asda have written to a Parliamentary group saying they will not sell milk produced in this way. These good-guy multiples include Tesco, Sainsbury, Waitrose and M&S. Morrisons said "maybe" they'd sell it, and Asda refused to answer such a hypothetical question.
The quality of milk produced so intensively is not as good as milk from grass-fed cows. There's no need to argue about this - just do the comparison yourself. (There is some reason to think that grass-fed beef may be healthier for humans to consume; but here, of course, we're chiefly concerned with dairy cattle.)
But the real reasons for opposing these huge industrial dairies is the welfare of the animals, for which the consumer has to take some responsibility.
Evolution has fashioned ruminants such as sheep and cows so that they are perfectly adapted to a diet of grass, and have teeth that equip them for grazing. They can convert roughages, unsuitable for man, into useful products because they have three preliminary compartments in their digestive tracts before the true stomach. One of these, the rumen, is a large fermentation chamber in which micro-organisms secrete the enzymes that allow cellulose to be digested.
Their digestive system is not geared up to grains and cereals. As food hero Michael Pollan says succinctly (on p 167) in his In Defence of Food, if ruminants "eat too many seeds they become sick, which is why grain-fed cattle have to be given antibiotics". And in The Omnivore's Dilemma (p 78) Pollan explains why: "Cattle rarely live on feedlots for more than 150 days, which might be about as much as their systems can tolerate". Though he is here writing about beef cattle, the veterinary objections he quotes are relevant to intensively fed dairy cows: "the diet would eventually 'blow out their livers' and kill them. Over time the acids eat away at the rumen wall, allowing bacteria to enter the animal's bloodstream. These microbes wind up in the liver, where they form abscesses and impair the liver's function". At slaughter, 15-30% of feedlot cows have diseased livers, and in badly managed pens as many as 70%.
The cost of our milk at Le Manoir has increased 8.25% since last year. We must simply regard this as the price of sourcing it ethically with full transparency about the practices of the dairies that supply us - and there have, of course, been devastating increases also in butter, cream and other dairy produce.
How are you dealing with this? Would you buy cheaper milk from a mega-dairy? Have you noticed a difference in the quality of milk from small-scale dairies and larger ones? Do you care about the animal welfare issues? And do you insist on transparency from your suppliers?
Best RB
But the real reasons for opposing these huge industrial dairies is the welfare of the animals, for which the consumer has to take some responsibility.
Evolution has fashioned ruminants such as sheep and cows so that they are perfectly adapted to a diet of grass, and have teeth that equip them for grazing. They can convert roughages, unsuitable for man, into useful products because they have three preliminary compartments in their digestive tracts before the true stomach. One of these, the rumen, is a large fermentation chamber in which micro-organisms secrete the enzymes that allow cellulose to be digested.
Their digestive system is not geared up to grains and cereals. As food hero Michael Pollan says succinctly (on p 167) in his In Defence of Food, if ruminants "eat too many seeds they become sick, which is why grain-fed cattle have to be given antibiotics". And in The Omnivore's Dilemma (p 78) Pollan explains why: "Cattle rarely live on feedlots for more than 150 days, which might be about as much as their systems can tolerate". Though he is here writing about beef cattle, the veterinary objections he quotes are relevant to intensively fed dairy cows: "the diet would eventually 'blow out their livers' and kill them. Over time the acids eat away at the rumen wall, allowing bacteria to enter the animal's bloodstream. These microbes wind up in the liver, where they form abscesses and impair the liver's function". At slaughter, 15-30% of feedlot cows have diseased livers, and in badly managed pens as many as 70%.
The cost of our milk at Le Manoir has increased 8.25% since last year. We must simply regard this as the price of sourcing it ethically with full transparency about the practices of the dairies that supply us - and there have, of course, been devastating increases also in butter, cream and other dairy produce.
How are you dealing with this? Would you buy cheaper milk from a mega-dairy? Have you noticed a difference in the quality of milk from small-scale dairies and larger ones? Do you care about the animal welfare issues? And do you insist on transparency from your suppliers?
Best RB
This is good to read this.
Fortunately, I'm (currently) in a position where I don't have to worry about the costs. As far as I'm concerned, I simply would not buy milk produced in such a situation.
Do I care about animal welfare? Yes. Partly because I care about the animals and also because I have come to realise that the better we look after our food animals, the better the eventual product – it's enlightened self interest.
And as such, I try to know as much about the meat and dairy produce that I buy as possible.
I am not rich at all, but I consider what I put into my body to be an essential issue, both physically and ethically. I would not buy cheap milk from a mega-dairy. I don't want cheap milk or butter - I want good milk and butter. I don't want to eat high yield economic units. I want to eat cows, chickens or pigs or lambs.
If that means I can only afford to eat meat a couple of times a week, or that I am careful about using my butter or milk, and less likely to waste it (tip: freeze what you're not immediately going to use) - fine, that's not going to do me any harm, and to me personally, it is worth it to know that my survival isn't at the expense of other complex living creatures having miserable lives.
Thank you for writing this blog entry - it's very informative.
Raymond as a chef I admire your talents and success but many chefs take the supermarkets shilling on the one hand while deriding a farming practice on the other which the power of the supermarkets created in the first place!
I also find the mis-information circulating around both the diets of dairy cows and their lifestyles very unhelpful in arguing the case for cheap milk production. Fibre is not the only source of energy in grass it is the soluble sugars in the drymatter (grass is mostly water) at 8-10% and a digestible cellulose (very weak fibre) which is about 25% of the total fibre fraction used as the main source of nutrient for the rumen microbes.
At 5% lignin the skeleton of the plant is worthless as an energy source though useful in otherways, while the neutral detergent fraction at 35% is potentially available if it stays in the rumen long enough for the microbes to break it down.
I used to put together the diets of dairy cows and making milk from grass that is extra wet, frozen or parched dead is not easy! What do people think cows are eating now in December here in the frozen UK, certainly not green grass in the fields and they won't be out at grass until March/April 2011!
So, any milk producing dairy cows diet is going to be on a diet measured in the drymatter of 20% protein, 5% fat, 6% ash 30% starch and sugar and 39% fibre of which about 10% is pure crude roughage to keep the rumen action going. This is normally the case for the first 180 days of her lactation i.e peak milk production.
The milk production dynamics on a small family farm dairy and on a large format dairy are pretty much the same for 9 months of the year with the contribution from grass being greater on the family farm but only significantly so for the months of May, June and July at best!
If we don't know the facts we let emotion dictate our decisions and I'd like to think we are better able to decide when we mix logic and emotion together in these things!