Is This MEAT The Cure For Britain's Obesity Crisis?

0:00Welcome to Catching Up With The Royals, a brand new show with me Richard Coles. And me, Emily Andrews. Every week we'll be going beyond the headlines, lifting the lid, and what life is really like behind the palace walls. Hello, sir. Good morning. I'm The Sun's new royal correspondent. Oh, he said, look at me up and down. Things are looking up. We'll be diving into the moments everyone's talking about. What does the world owe you if all of a sudden you've handed back your crown? Meghan and Harry can't keep hold of their staff. We'll reveal the secrets of an organisation usually shrouded in mystery and explore defining moments of royal history to see how the past still shapes the monarchy today.

0:38Now, you actually knew Princess Diana. I think one of the ways she acquired power was through that relationship with the present. But before that interview, no-one had really spoken and been so open. Was that a game-changer? So join us every week wherever you get your podcasts, on YouTube and on Saturdays on 5 as we catch up with the royals.

1:03Welcome to the Unprocessed Truth and today we're going to be talking about a pain point that's going to be close to home for everyone. I'm going to delve into a secret of how we could address the cost of living crisis we're all facing and the food inflation we're all experiencing. We have a simple resource and asset in the UK that could make all the difference to our health and our wallet, yet nobody's talking about it.

1:33What are we talking about? Well, we know money is tight. It's hard for everybody. We all feel it. And our weekly shop prices are going up and up and up. And at the same time, the health of the UK is in a complete mess. 64 % of the UK are now overweight or obese. And we need to do something about it because it's putting huge pressure on the NHS. We need to think about practical solutions and things we can do to really make a difference to the system. I mean, every politician says, we're going to tackle inflation, we're going to tackle cost of living crisis, and yet all they seem to do is spend more money, when the truth is, what we can do is right in front of our nose.

2:13So we're going to talk about a subject that you may not expect, but it's actually deer and venison. Why would deer and venison be the answer to our cost of living crisis? Three months ago, I went to the only temperate rainforest in the United Kingdom. Now, most of you think I'm crazy. There aren't rainforests in the UK. But the truth is, a rainforest is simply defined by the amount of rainfall. And there is a beautiful place in Cornwall near Bodmin that has the UK's only remaining temperate rainforest. And when you go there, it is a magical experience. You can see how different it is compared to a normal woodland.

2:51And this is because of the bygone shipbuilding eras. You know, the UK used to be covered by forest. But when we built all these ships out of wood, basically, we chopped most of the old ancient rainforest down and replaced them with woodland, fast growing trees and everything else. But this is really important because there I met a man called Merlin Hanbury Tennyson, who wrote the book Our Oaken Bones, Restoring Britain's Natural Rainforest. And he's a conservationist. He runs his own retreat and estate. And he's also planning to restore Britain's rainforest. And he's starting to replant them himself as well.

3:29So he knows about this subject in massive detail. But the thing he told me was we have too many deer in the UK. We have about two to three million deer every year in the UK living free and wild. And you think, well, why is that a problem? They're not doing anything. but the issue is they eat all the tree saplings and when you see the little oak trees trying to grow from the acorns that have fallen recently he says none of them will ever mature to be a full tree because of the deer that will come along and eat those little saplings it's perfect food for them so we have an overpopulation situation going on the deer which is stopping us from growing new forests, which are also good for the environment and for sustainability and the nature and the ecosystem of the UK.

4:19So we know there's this issue that we've got too many, about one to two million by estimates. Obviously, no one's gone around and counted every single one, so they don't actually know exactly how many there are. But you've got one to two million wild animals that are there ready to be eaten. And if we ate them, as gruel as it sounds, we would massively feed the population really affordably really cheaply whilst at the same time helping Britain's forests and ecosystem and natural wildlife to function more properly and more in harmony and balance so it's a good thing for nature but why is it so important for the cost of living crisis well if you've seen prices of beef in the last year they've gone up by about 40%.

5:04I used to buy it on organic mints from Tesco. It used to be about£4.50,£5, and it's just breached£9.25, which I am shocked and appalled at and I refuse to buy it and I now go to my local butcher who provides it far cheaper and I know the meat is coming locally. But this is the key, right? Factory farming and the way we farm things has, and the incentives have been dressed up all wrong for several years that we're actually incentivizing farmers to not rear cattle and we're incentivizing them to put solar panels on their land now that means there's about i think the number's around four percent less dairy cows in the uk this year which is then driving this shortage of beef which is then driving the demand and more and more people are waking up to the truth that red meat in itself is healthy for us as long as it's unprocessed and natural red meat So the increased demand on beef has gone up while the number of cows has gone down, which is driving this crazy price inflation we're seeing.

6:07Huge problem for everybody's wallets. We're all significantly pressured and struggling for cash. And Rachel Reeves is about to take more from us. So we need cheaper solutions. Now, I don't quite know how we would do this. But if we simply just said we need to eat more venison and provide incentives, whether the government provided incentives or whether farmers were providing incentives to go and get that wild venison population down, put more meat on our shelves that's local to the UK, we would be able to bring the pressure off beef into venison and therefore balance this system out. So not only would you be able to eat 500 grams of venison mints cheaper than you would your beef, your beef prices would also come down.

6:53So this is a really, really interesting solution that could really start to make a huge impact on our weekly shop if someone, maybe the government, actually took an initiative and wanted to redress the balance in our ecosystem, prioritize local meat. But this is where our food system goes wrong a little bit because actually a lot of the venison you'll find on the supermarket shelf today comes from New Zealand because supermarkets will prioritize consistent supply of which we don't really have a farming approach to venison very solidly in the UK. So they want consistent supply and they'll go to New Zealand and ship that meat in even though we've got too many deer on our shores.

7:34And, you know, this is the biggest issue with the food system. Like to save ourselves from an economic and environmental disaster, we need to source food locally. It's better for the environment. It's better for our health. The less food miles the food has, the more nutrition is in that food. But our system doesn't really incentivize it. So it's cheaper for the supermarket to go buy venison from New Zealand than it is get someone to farm it or hunt it, more specifically here in the UK and bring that deer population down. So really, really interesting idea with huge implications. And sure, you might say, oh, venison's a bit elitist.

8:13Typically it's trendy foodies that love venison or your waitress shopper. But the truth is, you know, we should eat what's local to us. Venison, you know, whilst seen as an elite food, food really is just incredibly healthy. It's an incredibly lean meat, high in protein, rich in iron, rich in B vitamins, and it's super healthy for us. So why wouldn't we eat it? In the past, you know, William the Conqueror, after the Norman invasion, declared that venison was a food fit for kings and slapped down forest laws, making deer hunting exclusive for the nobility, which is crazy deer parks used to be seen as the ultimate aristocratic flex and fundamentally it's just another animal right a beautiful one at that that lives in our nature fantastically but is causing problems for our rainforest and we should manage the population in other areas of the world including america they manage actively the animal populations to make the ecosystem live in harmony because not all the deer in the UK is actually native to the UK.

9:20It was brought over on ships from the French and other places. So we need to restore that natural balance because we have this surplus of deer that's causing issues. And when there's a surplus, it's simple supply and demand. If we've got loads of supply and not that much demand now, venison can be incredibly cheap if we incentivize farmers. And this is part of the problem. If we go back to the food system, we incentivize farmers to produce wheat and corn so therefore we've got all these ultra processed foods with wheat and corn in them if we remove the subsidies around to places that would produce more vegetables more meat, you know, more organic the supermarkets are just a marketplace and they will sell more of it and put more on the shelf so if we all go out there and buy more venison the supermarkets will look at this and go how do we create a better venison supply can we work with some of our venison farmers We do have them in the UK, they do exist.

10:16And can they work on a way to get some of that deer surplus down, get more affordable meat onto our shelves, help the health of the UK whilst bringing down, you know, the cost of meat for us all. So it's a win-win for the environment, for our health and for our wallet. And no matter where I go, people are feeling this cost of living crisis. It is painful for everybody and really easy to fix if we just focus our energy and intention in the right places where we have potential surpluses of food that could be switched into our supermarkets in a way that makes it more affordable and more accessible for everyone.

10:54But what we need is you guys to do your bit and vote with your wallet. And then at the same time, the government potentially to do their job a little bit better rather than just raise taxes. And then we would have a system where we could have nutritious, healthy and affordable food. this world of constant inflation that we've been living through since 2020 doesn't have to be this way we can reverse it we've got to evolve our food system at the moment it's horrible we feel like we're devolving our food system because your penguin bars and your kids lunch boxes now can't even be called chocolate because they've taken the cacao out because it's too expensive that's another example of where we're making the food system worse right we should be investing more into the farms of West Africa to help protect their harvests, help make them more weather resilient so that we don't go through these really painful cost inflationary pressures where cacao prices are, you know, 400 % up year on year in some places.

11:54So, you know, we need to think about the farmers, we need to think about where we invest in our food system. And right now we don't invest enough in our farms, we don't move the subsidies around enough, and we need to have a much more flexible model that can adjust to the pressures that are put on you know in the world whatever happening wherever it's happening so that is the unprocessed truth of how we can actually fix our food system how some really clever thinking can drive better outcomes for everybody and i hope you enjoyed listening to the unprocessed truth