BOUSSY-SAINT-ANTOINE, France (AP) — Truck driver Jeremy Donf understands French farmers are struggling and he wants to support local food producers. But like many consumers, buying French produced food isn’t always an option.
BOUSSY-SAINT-ANTOINE, France (AP) — Truck driver Jeremy Donf understands French farmers are struggling and he wants to support local food producers. But like many consumers, buying French produced food isn’t always an option.
That is not the sentiment I got from media reports over the last years. Usually farmers do want to produce eco-friendly, but they can’t market their stuff at a higher price.
This sounds like a populist claim. Where would the “good products” get exported to? What even is “higher quality” and “lower quality” in meat?
For fun, I checked the packaging info on ground meat I bought today. It reads, translated:
I live in the Netherlands, and almost all our meat gets exported to Germany. Most our store bought meat comes from eastern Europe. In fact it’s our most exported product in volume, not in value.
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Low quality is typically achieved by industrialised farming with the goal of raising the animals as quickly as possible, the criterion for “ready for slaughter” being just the weight. This leads to meat which contains a large amount of water, which will come out the moment you cook it, leaving you with a whole lot less meat once you’re done. Taste wise it tends to be underwhelming, too. Low quality pork from pigs fed with a disproportionate amount of fishmeal can even have a distinctly fishy taste.