GTN Issue 85

PUTTING GAME ON THE CHRISTMAS TABLE

Liam Stokes from the British Game Association extends his sincere hope that eating game is for life, and not just for Christmas

WHETHER we like it or not, Christmas and New Year is a time for game. Game sales surge at this time of year, and supermarkets multiply all their wild meat lines. Given that it is our job to get game onto people’s plates, I might sound a little ungrateful for this sudden interest in our sector. But we want to grow beyond the festive period. We talk of “all year round” as the mountain top for which we are aiming.

So we can be a bit Scrooge-like about the festive excitement for game. “Oh, now you want high-welfare, wild-harvested meat!” But we’re not alone in that sensation. Butchers who pass the rest of the year busting a gut for customers spend December putting crowd-control measures in place to handle the queues of newly-conscientious consumers desperate for a free-range turkey.

This year of course, the rush for turkeys hit a road bump in the form of bird flu. I wrote about this extensively in my last column for Gun Trade News, and its impact on the game meat sector. Since then— and I type this while touching all the wood I can lay my hands on—the effect on shooting has not been quite as bad as we feared. There are certain areas, certain shoots, that have been decimated, and my heart goes out to them. But in many places the season continues unabated.

The effect on the game sector has in fact been indirect, a shift in patterns of demand driven by the far worse repercussions being experienced by the poultry sector, and the free-range poultry sector especially. A great deal of British game is currently being exported, in feather, to the Continent. This has long been business as usual with wild-shot mallard, but this year there is a roaring demand for game birds in Europe, to make up the shortfall in the farmed duck that constitutes a significant percentage of European Christmas table birds. The interesting question is whether this trend is a flash in the pan, driven by the bird flu epidemic that has sadly carried off so many farmed ducks around the world, or whether it might prove a little more sticky. Much will depend on whether bird flu remains endemic and the on-going regulatory response to the disease.

Similar considerations abound in the UK, where free-range producers are reeling. The exact make-up of the problem is hard to get a handle on. The press is full of stories of festive turkey shortages, and it is certainly true that free-range producers are taking the brunt of the storm. The food industry data we monitor is very clear, turkey availability (like eggs) is way, way down, and free-range is especially hard to come by.

Yet, anecdotally, the way this news is being spread is causing a headache for small producers who are not experiencing problems with AI. Small-scale farmers have taken to the press to bemoan a drop in demand as consumers are reading about turkey shortages and opting for alternatives. This is likely to be a highly localised situation, because a quick trip to your local butcher’s or farm shop would show the laws of supply and demand in full swing.

Not deer

At BGA we did just such market research, and found whole free-range turkeys being sold for £90-plus, crowns going for over £40, and butterflies for £35. Pheasants, by comparison, were around a tenner a brace. What, then, to do with this information?

This is a challenge because a great many game shots, shoot owners and game cooks are also somehow engaged in farming. Even if they aren’t, game shooting is one thread in the rich tapestry of rural life and the working landscape. It is always difficult to strike the balance between promoting game and running down the alternatives, and this is something over which we often take criticism.

The fact is, any positive choice is also inherently a negative choice. By choosing game, you are for at least that one meal choosing not to eat, for example, turkey. And so the choice is comparative by nature.

It is not always enough to talk about the value of game in isolation. It’s leanness, or its micro-nutrient content, or even its environmental credentials, only make sense in comparison with other choices. So all food marketing, to some degree, implies criticism of the competition.

This issue becomes all the more sensitive, perhaps, when the point of difference is price and the driver is a disease. Yet it is my view that BGA exists to promote game, and it would be a failure in our responsibilities to everyone who donates to the cause not to share the simple fact that, this season, one of the key virtues of game is price.

This is an unusual promotional angle for us. We all know game can be obtained for free if you’re willing to put in the work or make the right friends, but it tends to arrive braced up with bailer twine and in need of plucking and drawing—skills that have long since fled the vast majority of modern cooks. So we tend to promote processed game, ready-tocook—and that is expensive, in comparison (that word again) with other seemingly similar meats.

An opportunity to position game as the more affordable option cannot be missed, especially at a time of year when people want high-welfare, and at a point in the economic cycle where everyone is feeling the pinch. The festive shopper wants freerange—and argue as much as you like about the early weeks spent on a game farm, game in season is as free-range as it gets. I hope farmers understand this is not about doing them down: it is about building game up. And let’s be honest, turkey is always going to do pretty well at Christmas!