I was really pleased with C4 for showing that last night (and the veal bit btw). It is a disgrace that people in this country are able to totally dissasociate eating meat with real animals. This is the reason that factory farmers get away with treating animals so badly. Kids think that meat comes from Tesco in a packet, adults know it doesn't but are able to ignore the connection of meat with animals because they just open a packet.
If more people knew how animals are intensively farmed then they wouldn't buy cheap meat, and farmers would have to improve the conditions that animals are kept in, it is as simple as that.
There is a culture here that people think they deserve to eat meat every day and this is a purely modern phenomenon. Historically meat was only ever an occasional food, every bit of the animal was used because meat was an expensive food. We now expect expensive cuts of meat for f?ckall money as a matter of course and the demand for this drives intensive farming practices.
I'm not a vegatarian but dp and dss are. I, however, rarely eat meat and only buy free range meat as my consience doesn't allow other wise. I read a piece in the Observer Food magazine about 4 years ago about the treatment of intensively reared pigs which made me nearly throw up.
Basically the journalist had visited one of the farms that supplies Tesco and witnessed sow pigs in tight spaces with the rotting corpses of some of their piglits. The farmers hadn't even been bothered to remove the corpses
I grew up in the countryside and knew pigs(and have seen them be killed), they are smart and sensitive animals and they deserve to be treated with respect.
Needless to say I haven't bought a piec of non organic pork since.
Sorry for the rant but this subject is one of my major bug-bears