Last night I was watching Jimmy and the Giant Supermarket on Channel 4 and his quest to replace some of Tesco's most popular meat products with free range and high quality meat products. On the first episode last night he was trying to replace Tesco's cheap meatballs made from low quality meat with meatballs made from high quality meat. He failed because in order to use high quality meat, the supermarket would need to increase the price of the meatballs which might turn some people away. When people go shopping only a small majority of people focus on buying free range and high quality meat, they get whatever is cheapest.
I've done some research and I think it must be impossibly to produce cheap free range and high quality meat and eggs. I looked on the ASDA website and I found out that the a single barn egg cost around 13p compared to a single free range egg which cost around 27p.
It's understandable because in order to produce free range meat it means the farmer needs to meet legal requirements of how much space to give the animal which can cost a lot of money and some farmers can't see the point when not many people can tell the difference between free-range and barn eggs or the difference between a pig that has spent it's life in a cramped barn with other pigs and a pig which has lead a happy life in the outdoors rolling around in mud.
Apart from price there might have been something else putting people off Jimmy's meatballs. They contained Veal (baby cow). People don't understand that there have been big changes in the way that baby cows are treated since the 1980's. They need a certain amount of space and they live in and they need to have a good quality of life. Veal is sold because it is a tender meat and inn my opinion I think it must be better them dying at 7 months old after living a little instead of just after they are born so I think people should buy veal.
In conclusion Jimmy is going to have a serious struggle to produce cheap free range meat for numerous reasons however if he pulled it off it would be truly brilliant.