This is still my stuff.

I’ve recently been trying to buy more food from small local shops. The menu thus obtained has until recently consisted most notably of vegetables, chilis and the like, as there are a couple of independent everything-sellers near enough to where I live; not having a butcher in the same local strip, I’d been leaving the supply of meat to Sainsbury’s.

Last week, in a fit of vague dissatisfaction with the quality, taste and price of said supply, I walked straight past the entrance to the Kingsland shopping centre in whose bowels the supermarket lurks, and straight into a halal butcher a few paces further along the road, where I bought 2 huge fillets of halal chicken for the princely sum of £1.75.

On converting this poultry acquisition into an extremely hot Thai red curry with the addition of the biggest Scotch bonnet I could find (my current culinary flame), I discovered, to my mild surprise, that the chicken was by my reckonings at least ten times better than that sold under the “Taste the difference” or “Organic” marques in Lord Sainsbury’s automated emporium. Not only much more tender, but tastier, and if I could tell that even through the swathes of spice, I mused, perhaps I was onto something.

So yesterday I went back and bought half a kilo of beef mince (again £1.75) and this steak, the latter priced at £3.19. You can't really get a decent sense of scale from the photo, but to give some idea, those who know me will know that I like a decent-sized steak, and even after cutting this one in two, it was still almost too much. (Obviously I wasn’t going to let a simple piece of cow beat me, but you get the picture.)

It wasn't the best steak I’ve eaten (though to be fair, it’s up against some stiff competition), and it wasn’t as significantly better than its supermarket counterpart as last week’s chicken - but it was very good, and it cost around a third of the price of my previous supplier's (see how easy that was?) equivalent wares. The mince is currently stewing in a slow chili con carne, so I don’t yet know how well that compares, but preliminary tastings seem good, even if the recipe was probably originally devised to cover up the shortcomings of less-than-perfect meat.

So, given that the motivation behind trying out this new meat channel was in large part to get away from the pre-packaged, plasticised, depersonalised and conveyor-belted “produce” purveyed by the Tescos and the Sainsbury’s and the Waitroses of the world, and that it incorporated an admittedly slightly uncertainly-targeted but nonetheless present and intended nod towards better provenance and husbandry, am I, in buying halal meat, whose actual level cruelty in preparation I’ve been unable realistically to ascertain from writings on Internet (SHOCK), merely rubbing my own snout further in a mire of hypocrisy? In addition, does the method of slaughter actually have any beneficial effect on the taste, or was the improved quality merely down to less mechanically or factory-farmed animals used by this particular butcher?

Fucked if I know.