Christmas really isn't cancelled, Bernard Matthews, you just can’t kill as many turkeys this year
The owner of the UK’s biggest poultry supplier, Bernard Matthews Foods, has made the absurd claim that a shortage of carbon dioxide gas, which is used to gas turkeys to death, means Christmas could be “cancelled”. The Bernard Matthews website is also calling for workers to fill labour shortages to ‘help save Christmas’.
A hike in global gas prices has resulted in the shuttering of two large fertiliser plants in Teesside and Cheshire, which produce CO2 as a by-product. The resulting shortage of CO2 is a real problem for the food industry, as it is used in the refrigeration and delivery of frozen foods.
The situation does create an animal welfare issue. Ranjit Singh Boparan, who owns Bernard Matthews, told the Guardian: “When poultry cannot be processed it means they must be kept on farms where there are potential implications for animal welfare.” What he means is that it becomes expensive to feed animals when they stay on a farm for longer than they are ‘supposed’ to, so they will likely be killed on site. With methods of killing in slaughterhouses already inhumane (despite what media outlets will uncritically report), this risks even more brutal deaths for thousands of animals killed under emergency conditions.
None of this validates Boparan’s shameful attempt to portray Britain’s Christmas celebrations as hinging on the success of his business and the poultry sector. As sales of plant-based food and drink continue rising, the meat and dairy industries have been on the backfoot trying to reintegrate themselves into the public consciousness as essential and as healthier and more British than vegan food with campaigns like We Eat Balanced by the Agriculture and Horticultural Development Board (AHDB). Trying to co-opt Christmas is another cynical tactic, as they increasingly have to contend with the fact that meat’s primacy on our plates can no longer be taken as a given.
Still, there will be a large portion of the British population worrying about what to eat for Christmas if turkey is off the menu. Around 10 million turkeys are eaten at our dinner tables every December 25th. But this only started to become a common tradition during the 1950s when the price of turkeys became affordable for more people, coinciding with the intensification of agriculture. Relentless Christmas advertising, including that from supermarkets, helped to further entrench the idea that turkey is an essential component of Christmas.
The other holiday strongly associated with turkey is, of course, American Thanksgiving, which may have helped popularise it as a festive food here. It’s telling of how deeply disconnected people’s thoughts are in America, as elsewhere, about the meat on their plates and the sight of living animals that the tradition of the President ‘pardoning a turkey’ has so far gone largely unquestioned as a cute and harmless ritual.
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The connection between meat and holidays isn’t limited to turkeys. Easter Sunday lunches often feature lamb, while anything involving barbecuing in the summer in either the UK or the US is typically meat-heavy. But there are ways to counteract the dominant perception of meat’s centrality to celebratory events and festive holidays - and the media have significant power in this regard.
Back in the spring, recipe website Epicurious went public with its decision to stop publishing new recipes featuring beef due to its climate impact. At the same time, its directors announced the site would be foregrounding recipes for meat-free ideas for summer cookouts, such as for America’s Independence Day on July 4th. They claimed that the changes, quietly made a year earlier, were working, stating that "The traffic and engagement numbers on these stories don't lie. When given an alternative to beef, American cooks get hungry."
Most popular recipe sites will have vegetarian and vegan sections, including special recipe collections for specific occasions like Christmas. But these are arguably still positioned as alternatives, often accompanied by statements like “Even meat-eaters will love them!”, as though meat-eaters never eat anything that isn’t from an animal. Recipe sites and other media outlets that publish recipes could make more effort to normalise meat-free festive and holiday foods by foregrounding them over meat options, and not portraying their tastiness as something surprising.
Supermarkets also have a role to play here. As Surge reported in June, research by Feedback revealed that the ten major UK supermarkets are still actively encouraging consumers to buy meat products through promotions, and are failing to cut the number of meat and dairy products available despite recommendations from experts for British people to cut their consumption by at least 20 per cent by 2030. Feedback recommended that supermarkets should rearrange store layouts to prioritise fruit and vegetables, end routine promotions on meat and dairy products, and introduce incentives for people to buy plant-based, such as by use of loyalty points.
These kinds of changes have a clear application during holiday and festive periods too. In the lead up to Christmas, for example, supermarkets could avoid using images of turkey or other animal bodies in their marketing, choosing instead to promote plant-based options of which there are many.
There is no possible way for the majority of British people to all eat the same animal on one day each year without factory farming them, subjecting them to cruelty and risking the spread of disease. Supermarkets and media outlets should acknowledge this and change their practice accordingly. The media, in particular, should also not let meat executives get away with making outrageous statements like the one from Boparan by simply repeating it over and over with no pushback. Christmas is as much about killing and eating turkeys as it is about buying each other junk that will end up in landfills the following week.
Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.
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