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Airdate: For the Love of Meat with Matthew Evans

Ex-chef Matthew Evans discovers that eating meat ethically and sustainably is more complicated than it seems.

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Gourmet Farmer‘s Matthew Evans returns to SBS this week with a new series, For the Love of Meat with Matthew Evans.

In this series he discovers that eating meat ethically and sustainably is more complicated than it seems.

Australians have a massive appetite for eating animals, and after the US, we consume more meat per person than any other country.

Worldwide the average person eats 34kg of meat per year, but in Australia it’s almost three times that – a whopping 90 kilograms*.

In new series For The Love Of Meat with Matthew Evans, Matthew pulls apart Australia’s love affair with meat and investigates what this carnivorous enthusiasm is doing to our health, the animals we eat, and to the planet.

Ex-chef, food critic and Gourmet Farmer Matthew Evans is not out to stop people eating meat – in fact he loves cooking it and eating it. Matthew wants to connect the average person to the animals they eat so they can better know where their meat comes from – from the paddock to the supermarket shelf, all the way to their dinner plate.

Over three weeks beginning Thursday 20 October 7.30pm on SBS, Matthew looks at Australia’s favourite proteins; chicken, pork and beef.

Free-range, organic, RSPCA-certified – what do these labels actually mean for a chicken? In episode one, Matthew visits several farms to try and better understand the conditions under which our chicken is produced. Matthew tries to help a large fast food brand Guzman y Gomez swap to serving only free range chicken, and takes to the streets of Western Sydney for a chicken burger social experiment.

A boutique free-range pig farmer himself, Matthew Evans wants to know how the majority of pigs are farmed in Australia. In episode two, after months of trying, Matthew Evans finally finds a pig farmer who will let him into their farm. Matthew takes a farrowing crate to Federation Square in Melbourne to put a piggy moral question to the public. Matthew then meets up with chef Adam Liaw to learn about how other cultures cook and eat ‘nose to tail’.

Hero of the Aussie barbie, steak is the quintessential Aussie meat. In the final episode, Matthew follows one cow all the way through the process to discover in front of a live audience how our favourite cuts are actually a tiny portion of the whole animal. He also reveals how much land is being cleared every day so we can graze cattle, and what impact 25 million cattle has to the environment.

In For the Love of Meat, Matthew discovers that eating meat ethically and sustainably is more complicated than it seems. It means choosing meat that comes from animals that have been reared humanely and ethically. It means using the whole beast, not just a particular cut. It means considering the environmental impact, and choosing native and sustainable animals. And sometimes it means eating less meat, or skipping the meat altogether.

Matthew’s mission is to get Australians to really look behind the farm gate and find out where our meat comes from, so that we can make informed decisions and choices about the meat we eat.

7:30pm Thursday October 20 on SBS.

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