The Times reports that Tops Day Nurseries, which has four thousand children in its charge across 32 nurseries in Hampshire and Dorset, has decided to feed its children wild-shot venison, which I understand is a first. They are working in collaboration with Eat Wild, which is the development board for British game.
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Five dishes have been created which are served three times weekly amounting to 3,000 meals a month in this nursery chain.
The report is that the population of wild deer in Britain is at its highest for a hundred years with an estimated 2 million. Conservationists and experts say that they threaten woodland and wildlife habitats.
The only predator of the deer is the human with the rifle.
There are no natural predators for the deer such as lynx or wolves although there has been talk of rewilding carefully selected areas of Britain with these wild animals.
The Times’s countryside correspondent, Will Humphries, writes that “the animals can decimate the biodiversity of woodlands by over-foraging the understory, vegetation beneath the canopy, that provides a habitat for other wildlife.”
Wild deer can also damage crops when they eat them at night. Reportedly agricultural businesses lose £20,000 worth of crops annually this way.
And cars are damaged across the country in collisions with deer which cost £45 million to repair.
And there are 75,000 accidents caused by deer annually in the UK resulting in between 10-15 driver deaths.
The Times paints a bleak picture of the impact of deer in the UK.
It is believed that 750,000 dear need to be shot annually to control their numbers whereas currently only 350,000 are killed annually. Conservationists favour an overall population of less than a million.
Deer shooters need to be incentivised to do their work. One such incentivisation is the price that they can fetch for deer carcasses. There needs to be increased demand for venison to push the price up.
The aim of Eat Wild is to achieve increased demand by finding new markets which explains why they’ve broken into the education sector and in turn why the nursery mentioned is feeding their kids venison.
The venison which feeds the children comes from two large estates in the South Downs according to Louisa Clutterbuck, the Chief Executive of Eat Wild.
She said that “The deer population is out of control so there is absolutely no problem with supply”.
She added that the deer population “will only increase with government funding more trees being planted across the country”.
She said that the education market was a new one into which venison can be supplied.
Hunters want £60 for a fallow deer carcass to make it viable to shoot them.
She added that “The stalkers barely cover their costs at the moment…rather than people seeing game as a restaurant and very high end, Michelin-star meat, we want it to be served at your local pub and taken home and cooked as a mid-week meal. We are also looking at supplying prisons and sports stadiums.”
Covid-19 had a negative impact on the venison market because of the closure of UK restaurants and the struggling hospitality businesses. Demand for venison collapsed resulting in less deer being shot and a surge in population numbers.
The culinary director of Eat Wild, Leon Challis-Davies believes that eating venison can provide kids with a “more nutritional and vitamin-rich food to help them develop”.
He claims that: “Wild meat is not only healthier, but it’s also more sustainable than what we consume from our current meat-producing sector. It’s much more flavoursome too. For the countryside community in particular, this is a huge win, and we hope to take it to the next level and introduce wild meat into higher education and beyond.”
Venison is high in vitamin B, protein and iron and low in fat. It’s a source of essential omega-3 acids and is described as one of the healthiest and sustainable meats available.
However, there have been numerous studies on the benefits of a vegan or vegetarian diet across all ages and particularly for the elderly. Is this a good development for kids’ health?
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