Field Report- The Back Door
Darlings,
Last week your favourite food freedom fighter reported from the wheat fields. This week, mes choux, I took a little trip to the seaside. Dover, to be precise. Not for the white cliffs — though they are ravishing in May — but because a fox had received some rather troubling intelligence.
Now, I have done a spot of smuggling in my time. Nothing serious — a wheel of Langres through Geneva customs in '94, a case of Armagnac out of Gascony in circumstances I shan't bore you with (the less said about that gendarme the better). But what I witnessed at Dover, darlings, makes my youthful indiscretions look positively quaint.
There I was, slinking along the port perimeter in the small hours — low belly, sharp nose, ears pricked — when I saw the vans. Not refrigerated lorries, mes choux. Vans. Transit vans, people carriers, coaches. Rolling off the ferries and straight through the port, barely slowing down. Because here is the thing that will make your blood boil: there is no meat inspection facility at Dover. Not one. The government, in its infinite wisdom, decided to put the checkpoint twenty-two miles away, in a place called Sevington. Drivers are supposed to take themselves there voluntarily.
I shall pause while darlings absorb the full majesty of that arrangement.
Voluntarily.
You will be stunned to learn, mes choux, that not everyone complies. By late last year, nearly one in five flagged meat shipments were simply driving past. Defra — bless them — calls these 'drive-bys', which makes an act of borderline biosecurity sabotage sound rather like a trip to McDonald's.
And what's in the vans? The port authority's own inspectors describe finding meat wrapped in bin bags, stuffed in suitcases, packed in cardboard boxes alongside a defrosted freezer, sometimes having travelled a thousand miles unrefrigerated from Eastern Europe. Pig meat on coach seats, darlings. On the seats. No labels, no temperature control, and in some cases — I am not making this up — the meat was originally classified as unfit for human consumption and destined for pet food.
Thirty-four tonnes of illegal meat seized at Dover in January alone, darlings. A record. Three hundred and ninety tonnes since checks began. And the port authority — the people actually doing the seizing — say this is the tip of the iceberg, because they inspect fewer than one in every five hundred vehicles.
One. In. Five. Hundred. The rest, mes choux, sail merrily on through to a high street near you.
And here is the part that really makes this fox spit: while all this is rolling in unchecked, your British farmers — the good ones, the proper ones, the ones who can tell you which field that lamb grazed and what the vet said last Tuesday — are being held to every standard going, at considerable expense, and then watching unrefrigerated mystery meat from a Moldovan Transit van undercut them on price. With foot-and-mouth back in Europe (Germany, Hungary, Slovakia — all this year, darlings), one dodgy shipment is all it takes. Une véritable catastrophe.
So. What does a fox do?
A fox buys meat from people he trusts.
And a fox — this fox in particular — is now on X. Find yours truly at @Reynard_Wylde, where I shall be causing precisely the sort of mischief that Big Food, the supermarkets, and the smugglers would rather I didn't. Do follow, darlings. Do share. Do make noise.
Because somebody has to guard the henhouse. And it might as well be a fox.
Toodle pip.
R.
X
PS — To the gentleman I observed at 3am on the A20 with a Transit van full of unrefrigerated pork and a continental number plate: I got your registration, mon ami. This fox has friends in low places.
