A view to kill

Only a surrealist novelist – or a British TV company – could have thought of creating a swish new restaurant in the grounds of an abattoir, with large picture windows overlooking the scene of slaughter. So here we are, a hundred of us, figments of nobody’s imagination, sitting in comfort in what was the yard of Mettrick’s slaughterhouse in the Derbyshire town of Glossop, waiting to watch our dinner being killed.

I made the journey to the Peak district (passing through the Hyde of Dr Harold Shipman), suspiciously. The same channel making this programme was also about to transmit Fat Men Can’t Hunt, a fairly typical late-era reality show in which eight fatties are tortured in the Kalahari by not being fed unless they catch and kill their own suppers. As ever this had been given the “this is really meaningful television” gloss by the publicists, just as today’s effort – Kill it, Cook it, Eat it– had been declared an attempt to reauthenticate the process of animal consumption by reconnecting people “with those shrink-wrapped packets of meats they buy in the supermarket and show the whole journey from farm to fork, from pasture to plate”.

That question, I agreed, was a good one. You don’t have to be a Marxist or a dark Green to see that there is something to the argument that we are too alienated from the natural world, and from the processes that support our existences. Of course, some aspects of this alienation seem more problematic than others. Not many argue, as Gandhi did, that you should make your own clothes, and we all (except devotees of colonic irrigation) welcome elaborate arrangements to ensure that we are speedily alienated from the consequences of our own bodily functions.