Special week for local butchers

Starting today, and running until 10th March, is National Butchers Week, just about perfectly timed with the saga of Dobbingate making ever more people question the trading practices of some supermarkets.

For many in Audlem, one of the most welcome items of news last year was the reopening of the village's own butchers with the arrival of Oxtail & Trotter in July 2012. They kicked off in style with a party, a BBQ and lots of samples and success has followed with an ever-growing local trade

Even better, all soon found, Oxtail & Trotter was run by a young enthusiastic local farming family who, full of ideas from Day 1, advertised exactly where their meat came from and who tried to source top quality product from as near as possible at all times.

Details

Meat from top quality breeds, blackboard details of where the farms are, a short uncomplicated supply chain, all meant reassurance about what you were buying. And best of all, it tasted really, really good.

In addition, they are using small artisan companies for sauces, chutneys and other products sold in the shop and have even sourced top quality charcuteries such as salamis and chorizos from a company in the Wyre Forest, down in southern Shropshire. These products have been praised in the national press as being as good as anything you can buy on the Continent.

Anyone who tasted their Wagyu beef recently, with its intense marbling and raised on a prize-winning Staffordshire farm, will have enjoyed something very special while bacon, for example, is cured locally by Maynards just over the border between Whitchurch and Shrewsbury.

Preparation

With Simon, the butcher, and his team preparing meat in the window, all was so different from the packaged mysteries of the likes of Tesco who have admitted in their own advertisements to not having checked their supply-chain the way they should have done. They say they will change, but that's literally a case of locking the stable door after the horse has bolted.

AudlemOnline makes no apologies for its unstinting support for a local shop and shopping locally as that was the driving force behind setting up the website in the first place – to help promote a vibrant, sustainable village with local shops and employment and, hopefully, a much better life-style as a result.

In contrast

We know Tesco are an important shop for many, but anyone who has dealt with Tesco will know the way they buy their products – on price, by computer, squeezing and squeezing suppliers until the inevitable possibly happens – suppliers may be tempted to cheat to stay in business. Or simply start making burgers and such-like with such questionable ingredients nobody would eat them if they even suspected the truth.

Will that change? Only Tesco know but, judging by another TV programme last week by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall about their purchases in Thailand, and their refusal to answer perfectly reasonable questions, nobody could be confident they will shift fundamentally from their current practices.

The alternative

Fortunately, in Audlem, we have an alternative: a top-quality local butcher to turn to. As one campaigner said this week: "If one in 10 people returned to their local butcher, it would make a real difference. If one in five, it would start a revolution."

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