Is cheap meat always a bargain? Definitely not.
I got to a stage a few months ago when I couldn’t bear to buy cheap bacon and chicken any more. Hens jammed into tiny battery cages and pigs trapped indoors for life didn’t bear thinking about. If I have to eat animals (which I do, because everyone else at home loves it!) I want to eat relatively happy creatures who’ve had a decent life out in the fresh air. So I found an organic, free range meat supplier online and prepared to take a massive financial hit.
There I was, ready to make economies elsewhere to cover the extra cost. But as it turns out, cheap chicken and bacon aren’t actually that cheap at the end of the day.
I’ve been struggling with bargain bacon for years, failing miserably because it contains so much water. It’s a bugger to cook. Although it smells OK it doesn’t taste of much once you’ve frazzled it to death and all the water has finally bubbled away. More annoying still, once you’ve cooked the water out of it there’s hardly any bacon left.
The organic free range bacon we now eat, in complete contrast, is crisp and non-watery, a dream to cook, doesn’t frizzle up to next to nothing and tastes the way I remember bacon tasting when I was little, before large scale farming took over.
Free range chicken is also spectacularly tasty. It isn’t pumped full of water either, and there are no additives, antibiotics or steroids. It cooks beautifully and doesn’t shrink down to nothing, which means we end up using less of it. I don’t need to de-frost two cheap chicken breasts because one organic one does the trick.
The prices aren’t as high as I’d expected either, probably because good quality food is in more demand than ever. If you fancy eating meat that behaves and tastes the way it should, I highly recommend it. Delicious! All thanks to the Farmer’s Choice website.
