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Meat the Family review: As four families learn the hard way, never give your dinner a pet name

In this new reality TV series, pigs, lambs, cows or chickens are welcomed as pets into households across the UK, and families must decide whether to spare them from the abattoir or to eat them

Sean O'Grady
Thursday 09 January 2020 00:16 GMT
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Meat the family trailer

When my commissioning editor asked me to review Meat the Family (Channel 4), I admit she unnerved me. The exchange, you see, went something like this:

My Commissioning Editor (MCE): “So can you review Meat the Family?”

Me: “Suppose so.”

MCE: “Do you know what it is?”

Me: “Something about veganism I should think? It’s very trendy.”

MCE: “Yes, it’s about a family giving up meat and if they don’t give up meat, then they have to eat their pet.”

Me: “What, the family dog?”

MCE: “Something like that.”

And indeed it is something like that. This first of three weekly episodes introduces us to a couple of families who seem to have taken their carnivorous devotion to extremes. Rather than “five a day” meaning various bits of fruit and veg, for them it translates as a compulsion to consume five different beasts of the field, whether roasted, grilled, salted, kebabbed or wedged in a sesame bun. To try and wean them from their ethically and environmentally questionable ways, the Channel 4 team has invited them to adopt some baby animals – ie potentially edible pets.

Family one (with two young boys) are handed a couple of cute saddleback piglets. Family two (three daughters) are given charge of a trio of broiler chicks. A third family, next week, will have some lambs gambolling around their homes. Each family will have three weeks with these “pets”, after which they have a choice: Take up vegetarianism, in which case their charges will be taken to an animal sanctuary to live out their span in some comfort – or carry on eating meat, in which case their pet pigs/lambs/chickens/cows will be placed back in the food chain (ie slaughtered), and the families will only see them again when they have been prepped for consumption. As if inspired by Shakespeare’s tragedy Titus Andronicus, the “pets” will be devoured by the families themselves.

The course of events is entirely predictable but no less telling for that. The families, and especially the kids, all take to their new arrivals in quite a full-on way. It isn’t too much to say that they fall in love with them. Mum Dawn, for example, makes it her mission to get a kiss out of Pauline the Pig, and is delighted when, after a few days of enticing the porcine personality with tasty high protein feed, there is indeed “lip contact”. (Channel 4 crossing the species barrier there, another TV first.) Her sons (that’s Dawn the human’s, not Pauline the pig’s) also form a bond with Pauline and sibling Irene (the latter named after their gran apparently), and to such an extent that the piglets’ presence in the back garden starts to interfere with their bacon addiction.

The lads also start to do some research on pig welfare and discovered that pigs are in fact the fifth most intelligent species on earth (just behind journalists) and can play video games (though I wonder how their trotters cope with an Xbox controller). A visit to Berlin by the family to meet a pair of “wonder pigs” confirms their intellectual capabilities. Fully house trained, their human keepers spend 10 hours a day tutoring their hogs, and have learned how to “speak pig” (though the pigs haven’t yet mastered German, which, I admit, is a bit trickier).

We’re yet to see what happens to the piglets, though the emotional pull of the pigs and the educative process about what goes into processed pork (nasty nitrates) has already led their adoptive family to cut down on their ham, salami and bacon intake. The broiler hens, though, have their fate sealed. After a reasoned, democratic family discussion that would shame the House of Commons in its seriousness, it is solemnly agreed that Jennifer, Clucky and Hayley, will be sent off to the abattoir, meaning that their brief happy lives of being pampered pets is well and truly over.

Broiler hens, it is explained to the kids, are bred purposely to have short lives, because they grow so plump so quickly their legs cannot support them after a few weeks. The decision is taken with some emotional trauma and tears at the dining table. A “cheeky Nando’s” will never be the same again for them, one fears. They pledge to become an ethically carnivorous family, even though free-range poultry is much more expensive than the factory-reared stuff. We witness the cramped conditions some factory chickens are kept in – 160,000 birds in a barn for their 41-day lives; but also the relative tranquillity of an open-air free-range farm.

The most upsetting scenes for all concerned come when Jennifer, Clucky and Hayley are returned dead and oven-ready, their cadavers cradled by weeping children. Still, they tuck in anyway when their pets are served up with some roasties, sweetcorn and bread sauce; Haley is the one the children are most inclined to eat because “she” had been the grumpiest of the three.

So a lot is learnt in the course of this unusually thoughtful example of reality TV, which more resembles an experiment by a university psychology department. The key moment is giving the creatures their names, which acknowledges their status as sentient beings with degrees of intelligence and even individual personalities. As the (human) mum of the chicken adopters, Cynthia, points out, the main reason why most of us still eat meat and poultry (and too much of it) is because “ignorance is bliss”. Knowledge, we find out, is murder.

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