Melisseus

By Melisseus

This little piggy

In 1967, the UK Wilson government established a quango called the 'Meat and Livestock Commission' (MLC). This was partly funded by a levy on the sale of livestock, and its purpose was the marketing and promotion of what Wikipedia questionably describes as 'red meat' from cattle, sheep and pigs. It was eventually (2008) subsumed into a larger state research and marketing organisation for a much wider range of farm products

In my blue, remembered days in the agricultural industry, I discovered that it was a covert policy of the MLC marketing pitch that in no way should the buying public be reminded that meat comes from animals. Advertising should avoid pictures of live animals on farms, and certainly shouldn't include anything like this. Nevertheless, it was quite common for such things to exist in traditional butcher's shops - the bulk of their customers presumably coming from a more robust generation than the snowflakes in the new-fangled supermarkets

I wonder if the policy might now rebound somewhat on the sector. If meat in supermarkets does not look like animals, that may make it all the easier to replace with 'factory-produced meat', created from fungi, plants, single celled organisms or animal cells grown in laboratory conditions - driven by either simple economics or by the exigencies of the climate emergency 

I looked up Baillière. There was a real Monsieur Jean-Baptiste Baillière: founder of a French publishing dynasty, born in 1795, who also established a branch in London. He specialised in medical and broader scientific literature. The name still exists as an imprint within thd Elsevier empire. If you need a nurses' or midwives' dictionary, look no further. Obviously he had a side-hustle in butchery. I do wonder if some of the names of these cuts have lost something in translation. Even in my meat-eating days, I don't remember being offered a gammon cushion

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