"Over the summer I chaired and judged a couple of panels on the quality food awards, as I mentioned in one of my previous blogs. Last year the category of meat, poultry and game was won by a superb product from Highland Venison, which then went on to win the overall Golden Q award. 

This win by a UK venison product pleased me no end, especially since it was the first time game had been entered into the category, and I was glad that good quality Scottish venison had beaten some 30 other (very good) products and made a name for British venison, as opposed to the imported New Zealand Venison which certain supermarkets insist on carrying.

Back in the hot seat

This year, as I sat in the chairman’s seat again and cast my eye over the list of 35+ entered products, I was very happy to see three of the major supermarkets had entered venison products. Great, I thought, it's about time we saw more British Venison on our shelves.

I made the assumption that this was English, Scotch, Welsh or Irish Venison, because all the products that we looked at proudly carried the Union Jack or the Scottish, Welsh or Irish flag. But I was wrong - every one of the products came from New Zealand.

Questions to be answered

Why oh why are they buying in New Zealand Venison when we have an ample supply in the UK? I asked this question of the supermarkets and was given a whole bunch of reasons as to why: for example, “The UK can not supply the demand for the Venison we need.” Rubbish - we have a great supply of Venison in the UK and through good management of wild stocks as well as naturally farming on large areas of open land, we supply more than any supermarket will ever need.

“The quality of the Venison we get from New Zealand is superior to the UK venison.” Rubbish again - the Venison we have in the UK is a natural product of our countryside. The only time when Venison is hit and miss is when non-specialist suppliers deal with it and do not know how to select animals for certain products.

But remember that we are dealing with a wild animal that has had very little intervention in its selective breeding. Let's not try to turn it into the modern day economy chicken that has no flavour. These birds exist because this is what the supermarkets demand - a 1.5kg or 2kg bird full of useless muscle, that cannot fly and can barely support its own weight. Venison is not what they would call perfect and calculable in portions as lamb, but then wild animals never are.

Free-range living

Another argument was that “We have to be accountable to our customers that the venison we buy has had the best possible husbandry and has been humanly slaughtered.” All our venison is, and I would go as far as saying that an animal shot in the field has less stress then one taken to the slaughterhouse. Our wild venison lives free, goes where it wants to go, eating what it wants to eat, it is as free-range as you can get, has the best husbandry of all, because it is a wild animal that is harvested quickly and cleanly with no stress. Our naturally-farmed venison lives in large expanses of countryside and in many cases is shot in the field.

Ladies and gents of the supermarket world, you are buying venison from New Zealand because it's cheap and because you can cheaply ship it over in containers with frozen New Zealand lamb. Our venison is some of the best in the world and the chefs I teach know this. It comes from our countryside, is supplied fresh and travels a relatively short distance to your shops, not half way around the world. Let’s not ignore this fantastic British commodity and let's be as patriotic about venison as we are now about our pork, beef and Lamb - making it available to all.