Rosa Steppanova

19 October 2007

While my vegetarian leanings have almost turned into principles over the years, there are times when nothing but a nice piece of red meat will do. Despite the middling summer, this year we’ve had a bumper crop of vegetables at Lea Gardens to go with homegrown Sunday roasts. The unexpected bounty, I’m sure, is largely due to the copious amounts of manure two ponies, stabled here during winter, produced.

Sparkle and Hjartur are a further step towards diversification, an aim that has been high on the agenda ever since my husband James and I started crofting in Tresta just over thirty years ago. Sheep played a significant part in our scheme. Right now my bare feet are warmed by a handsome, home-tanned moorit rug, and somewhere in the attic, a chunky jumper called Mildred awaits mending. Mildred, a splendid, twin-producing ewe in her day, has long since gone the way of all things mortal but the garment, knit from the home-spun yarn of her fine multi-coloured wool, lives on.

Peter and Barbara Hicks, who owned the Stump Farm slaughterhouse at Reawick, started marketing whole boned and rolled lightweight lambs for the catering industry in the early 1980’s. They also manufactured a wide range of sheepskin products, exported kidney fat to the Faroe Islands, where it is considered a rare delicacy, and were looking into soap or candle production.

I liked their waste not want not approach but my career at Stump – I’d learned to turn a carcass into a large bone-less roast in just over an hour - came to an abrupt end when I received my first and disappointingly meagre pay packet. The skill I acquired has remained with me to this day and is honed every autumn as soon as the lamb and mutton carcasses are returned from the slaughterhouse.

Not only do boned and imaginatively stuffed shoulders have the culinary edge but they also take up comparatively little room in a freezer. The freezer! What a difference that appliance must have made to the crofting households all over Shetland? It certainly did, and still does to ours. As fond as I am of reestit mutton, one can get too much of a good thing. Every autumn our kitchen turns into a sheep processing plant for a few days, churning out everything from lamb mince and goulash to concentrated stock frozen in ice cube trays.

There’s nothing like fresh, local, and preferably organic produce, and Shetland hill lamb and mutton is amongst the finest meats in the world. But what do we usually find on Shetland supermarket shelves? The bland, grass-fed New Zealand version. It gives a rather hollow sound to their pledges of serving the community. Allegedly even some of legs of reestit mutton that grace the windows of Lerwick butcher shops just now have a “Made in N.Z.” stamp on them because of cost implications. Yes, it’s that strange world called the capitalist market economy.

Food miles and the associated environmental damage aside, such imports can only be described as bizarre. So why are we doing it? Because the British (that I presume includes us Shetlanders) demand a big roast I’m told. Has nobody ever thought of banging a couple of small roasts in the oven instead? They beat that big joint in the tenderness and taste stakes, and take a fraction of the time to cook, thus saving a bit of energy into the bargain.

While the grave situation we are faced with this autumn is hopefully a one-off, I can recall several seasons in the past when small hill lambs were all but worthless. Unless we can turn them into a top of the range valued added product with a secure market, should we really continue producing them in such large numbers?

Decades of, primarily intensive, sheep keeping in Shetland have come at a very high cost to our environment. Shetland’s tall-herb meadows and indigenous trees have all but vanished; overgrazing, re-seeding and compaction have destroyed our hill land and led to large-scale land erosions.

And now thousands of lambs are going to be shipped to the Scottish mainland to be incinerated. Can we really not come up with a kinder and more imaginative solution? I for one would prefer to receive the headage compensation payment on offer to buy additional feeding to keep my lambs on the hoof until there’s more space in my freezer. Not only would this safe them a long, stressful journey, it would also save the taxpayer the transport, abattoir and incineration costs.

Perhaps the time has come to re-examine our relationship with the land, and to take a closer look at our obligations towards the animals we rear. Not only do we owe them the best life possible, we must also make sure that their end is swift and as stress-free as possible. There’s a tradition in peasant communities the world over that reaches back into biblical times and beyond. It has at its core the words dignity and respect in relation to the animals we kill for food. Our consumer culture, based on cheap meat and battery farming, seems to have forgotten this.

I know where my lambs are going this autumn, and it ain’t south.