A recent post on British social media in which a housewife complained about the price of a leg of lamb went viral.
She posted a photo of a leg of lamb on her account and wrote as an aside: “I asked my husband to go to Tesco to buy a leg of lamb, only for him to come home and tell me it cost £30.86 for one leg, a price he actually accepted after checking with the sales clerk. But how can it be so expensive! I can’t agree to that, I’m going to return it tomorrow!”
Is a lamb leg for over £30 really a black-hearted price? A butcher familiar with the market soon came out to explain. He said that it costs at least £100 to buy a lamb from a local farm, £40 to have the slaughterhouse slaughter it and send it back to the store, and the cost of running a butcher store, including rent, utilities, taxes, wages, etc., is divided into about £60 for a lamb, so if all the parts of a lamb are sold for less than £200, it will lose money, and considering that sometimes it has to be sold at a discount, the usual price has to be higher! So it’s not really an exaggeration to say that your husband spent more than £30 on a lamb leg.
I was curious and looked up the price of lamb shanks in all the major supermarkets in the UK, and this lamb shank at Tesco was £13 per kilo, which is actually about the same as other supermarkets. The housewife thought it was too expensive, but what she didn’t realize was that the lamb that modern people take for granted comes from lambs less than a year old (lamb), something that was actually quite expensive in past recipes.
I remember that in the TV series “David Copperfield” based on Dickens’ famous book, the hero David and his wife Dora invited the Micawbers, who had treated him well as a child, to their home for dinner, and the roasted leg of lamb that was the main course came from an adult lamb (mutton) over three years old. It is actually in recent years that lamb has replaced adult lamb as the mainstream. Lamb is more tender and more expensive.
According to the butcher’s analysis, assuming the lamb is produced on a farm in the UK, you can see that only half of the cost of the retail price actually comes from the farm. Even so, the price of lamb from British farms is still higher than the price of lamb imported from overseas.
A quick trip to a British supermarket will reveal that New Zealand lamb is significantly less expensive, even though it comes from far away. Before Brexit, the UK’s own produce was protected and there was an annual quota for lamb imports from non-EU countries. After Brexit, the Conservative government rushed to sign free trade agreements with Australia and New Zealand in order to show its image of “global Britain” and made significant concessions on agricultural import quotas. It is estimated that in a few years the import of meat from New Zealand will rise by 40%, and the price is at least 1/3 lower than the local product, when the British farmers will have a more difficult time.
But the most touching part of the British housewife’s complaint is this latter statement: “Some families can’t even get 30 pounds a week to feed their children.” This statement may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it is true that the cost of living in the UK has risen in recent months, putting great pressure on low-income families. On the one hand, the impact of the epidemic on the economy has caused a drop in income; on the other hand, energy prices have increased significantly, pushing up inflation and driving up the price of daily necessities.
The unit price of British civilian coal and electricity is capped, so the rate of increase is not out of control, but the regulatory body responsible for setting the capped price announced not long ago that from April this year, the capped price will rise 54%, and estimated that each household’s annual expenditure on normal gas and electricity will reach about £ 2,000, that is, about £ 40 per week, more than the price of the aforementioned lamb’s leg.
The housewife’s fierce reaction to the price of lamb shanks, perhaps out of a lack of understanding of the price of lamb, but which reflects the rising cost of living resentment, but quite resonant with many British people.
