An English football team has replaced the beef patties in the stadium hamburgers with wild British venison, a change that’s proving popular with the fans, and better for the environment.
Some forms of cattle ranching produce significant greenhouse gas emissions among food supply chains, while others sequester more carbon than is emitted by the animals.
Living a wild or semi-wild existence though makes venison among the lowest-impact meats available, and Levy UK, the hospitality manager for some 20 stadiums and sports parks across the country, say it will slash an estimated 85% of the carbon emissions from their supply chains.
The venison was available already at the Women’s Rugby World Cup Final at the Twickenham ground in London in September, a month that saw 5,500 venison burgers sold.
At the home of the English Premier League soccer team Brentford FC, it could even be said the burger is doing better than the team.
“Our fans really like it,” James Beale, the Head of Sustainability and Community at Brentford, told Reuters. “It’s more popular than the beef burger from last year.”
Levy UK manages other major venues including London’s O2 Arena, the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, the National Theater, and the Oval cricket ground, and is taking measures to reduce the carbon footprint of their menus. Aside from venison, they make condiments out of surplus or misshapen vegetables that would otherwise be sent to landfills to decay.
Some 2 million deer roam wild across the UK with no natural predators, just 20% or so less than the number of cattle, dairy and beef, in the country. The lack of natural predators presents a risk, as American readers will likely know or have heard, of disease.
With no major predator populations of any kind across most of their range, American mule and whitetail deer have been decimated by chronic wasting disease, a prion disease similar to Mad Cow, that poses substantial threat to the populations.
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Excess deer numbers, at least in the US, have also been linked to increases in Lyme disease and traffic collisions, and the injuries and fatalities stemming from them.
The major environmental nonprofit Rewilding UK has for years been trying to return the lynx to Great Britain, a native predator that will prey on deer but which has never caused a human fatality.
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Until then, venison presents as the perfect alternative to beef in UK restaurants, as it’s leaner than beef, richer in protein than poultry, supports rural economies, and is gathered sustainably from animals able to live their best life in the wilds of the UK rather than languishing on a feedlot.
WATCH the story below from Reuters…
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