Saint Bernard?

Bernard Matthews died last week at the age of 80. Matthews and the company he founded was one of the UK’s largest food processors and it’s fair to say he divided opinion.

Animal welfare campaigners were critical of ‘factory farming’ methods and chef Jamie Oliver famously, or infamously, chose the company’s Turkey Twizzlers as a stick with which to beat school-dinner menus. Accompanying some of this was, I’m afraid to say, some old-fashioned snobbery.

Matthews said in a BBC interview: ‘When I started, the price of turkey was extremely expensive for the ordinary person. To put it in perspective, there were less than one million turkeys being produced in England in 1950 when I began and in those days a man had to work for a week, the whole of a week’s wages to pay for a turkey for Christmas. Today, it only takes two hours of his working time to be able to buy one.’

Now, whatever you might think of Matthews, that is a noble aim: to provide cheap and tasty food for the masses. This notion of feeding people is absent from much of the contemporary dialogue of the chattering classes. This dialogue has given rise to another food industry, partly based on the notion of being organic, locally sourced and so on. Unfortunately, much of its output prices me (and I earn a decent wage) out of its market and I’m sure it does the same for many other people. There’s no point having a ‘food movement’ if it can’t feed people. So this really becomes a debate about elitism and snobbery.

Oh, and by the way, I have eaten Bernard Matthews’ Turkey Roasts on numerous occasions. My verdict: well, it begins with the letter ‘b’.

Lyndon White
Editor, Processingtalk

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