Little Veal
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Veau Beau milk fed veal is unique in the UK and maybe the world.
It is the most juicy and tender meat you will find anywhere.
Our aim is to encourage a more holistic notion to an institutionalised farming practice and
produce from that an extraordinary gastronomic eatable.
There’s a lot of reason to eat less meat these days. One reason not so wildly known is the direct pressure put on the environment through meat production. Scroll down to read about it in detail but, in short, our young bulls are fed naturally on what would otherwise be a waste product (milk) to become a super low-fat, low-impact protein.
It is ethically correct to eat Veau Beau veal. The calves are reared in small family groups with lots of space to gallop around in (like they love to) on masses of comfy straw that they can chew if they feel like it. Some life is better than no life and our young bulls are nurtured and respected twice; in their life and their necessary end - their beautiful veal, their ‘veau beau’.
We are committed to make meat only from the dairy-bull calves who have no alternative use. Numbers will be finite during each season which lasts 6 to 7 weeks. Once in the Spring (mid March – mid April) and once in the Autumn (mid October – mid November).
Veau Beau is about to become available for the very first time.
William and I have been enjoying its deliciousness for a couple of years now and experimenting with the best cuts.
Here are some of our favorite Veau Beau meals to get your taste buds in the groove...
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Double rib chops ‘french trimmed’ stuffed with truffle butter and then breadcrumbed
Veal burgers in homemade brioche baps with gruyere and smoked paprika aioli
Schnitzel ham and cheese ‘sandwich’
Lasagna Vincisgrassi
KFV (yes, Kentucky Fried Veal)
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Orders are now being taken for the Autumn 2016 season
Mail to info@veaubeau.co.uk or call Rosie on 07815 902751
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keep Scolling down for notes on rose veal and Real Farming and please see our important page on Ethics….
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Why not rose veal?
I find rose veal an insipid, undecided sort of meat. It’s a better fate for any dairy-bull calf than a postnatal death for sure but it is without the sought-after qualities of white veal (milky tenderness) and lacks the beefiness of, well, beef.
Meat begins to gain colour (redness), flavour and toughness as soon as solids (grass, hay, straw, grain, pellets etc) enter the diet. So rose veal never gains the flavour of 18 month old beef, but grows less tender pretty quickly.
It’s also yet another animal needing spacious areas of grass that could be put to more valuable human food production (see below reference to low-impact farming).
We DO NOT produce milk veal as they do in Europe where they keep on feeding a pure milk diet to calves for months and months in order to make more £ per carcass. This is utterly unnatural. At 4-5 week calves need solids
in their diet for their stomachs to develop properly.
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Real Farming or ‘Enlightened Agriculture’
Colin Tudge from the Campaign for Real Farming and the College for Enlightened Agriculture coined these phrases. They can be informally but adequately defined as “Farming that is expressly designed to provide everyone everywhere with food of the highest quality, forever, without wrecking the rest of the world”.
The grand aim is to help to create “convivial societies within a flourishing biosphere” and the
net result should be to achieve Food Sovereignty.
Simon Fairlie wrote the book ‘Meat – A Benign Extravagance’. It is an exploration of the difficult environmental, ethical and health issues surrounding the human consumption of ‘animal flesh’.
It lays out in detail the reasons why we must decrease the amount of meat we eat, both for the planet and for ourselves and explores how different forms of agriculture shape our landscape and culture.
At the heart of this book, Simon Fairlie argues that society needs to reorientate itself back to the land, both physically and spiritually and explains why an agriculture that can most readily achieve this is one that includes a measure of livestock farming. Interestingly, Fairlie caused vegan advocate George Monbiot to withdraw his support for the no-animal-products-for-anyone-ever vegan model in favor of a system that includes some sustainably raised animal foods. A kind of ‘ Let them eat meat , but farm it properly’ admission.
As an aside, it’s interesting that vegetarianism only became possible because of ancient societies development of dairy products and the unwitting consumption therefore of the only other effective source of vitamin B12.
B12 is the weakest link in a vegan diet. Without it they can suffer from potentially lethal symptoms of its deficiencies.
Fortunately, scientists are now able to create B12 from bacteria to make supplements.
Food Analyst Sanderine Nouherbel demonstrates that up to a certain point livestock can be fed on food residues.
During this time their environmental impact in respect of the land they require remains very low. If people consume meat from animals fed on dedicated feed crops, the environmental impacts become much greater.
Professor Louise Ottilie Fresco’s book ‘Hamburgers in Paradise’ is the culmination of decades of research and provides valuable insights into how our food is produced, how it is consumed, and how we can use the lessons of the past to design food systems to feed all humankind in the future. It considers our huge food surpluses, the productivity of agriculture and how we’ll feed 9 billion people in 2050 requiring 75% more animal proteins.
She also explains how some meat (especially veal) is as an unavoidable by-product of keeping animals for other vital purposes, such as dairy or for grazing management or muck for organic crops.
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Below are some handy PDF’s of the pages I found most relevant.
