We've talked about how Brexit will affect immigration, the banking sector, our passports, airline prices, and Erasmus. But how will it affect our Christmas dinner?
Sit down, pour yourself a snowball (with help from the Dutch) and let's dig in...
Chlorine Turkey
We’ve all heard of chlorine chicken, the US Department of Agriculture-approved treat that could be served up on British plates once your poultry industry is free of petty EU regulations.As lecturer Simon Dawson explained, without EU rulings on minimum space, lighting and ventilation for the birds, disease and contamination can spread quickly amongst the crammed-together flock. “Washing the chicken in a strong chlorine solution … provides a brash, cost-effective method of killing any microorganisms on the surface of the bird.” (You can read more about the benefits and potential risks of chlorine chicken in Dawson’s article here.)
Whatever your read on the safety of chlorinated chicken, the idea isn’t particularly appetising. But could our post-Brexit Turkeys also be subject to a quick swimming-pool rinse?
Currently, Turkeys in the UK spend half their lives in windowless rearing sheds. Some birds are debeaked to stop them pecking each other. “Stocking density” varies according to how big the birds are, with one BBC article reporting that the Bernard Matthews site at Holton has around 7,000 birds in each 500m long shed. Currently, “industry and government standards use a formula based on the weight of the birds” to decide limits on this.
It’s not clear whether the removal of EU regulations would change this (and therefore, potentially, necessitate a chlorine wash). Many of the major providers, particularly more upmarket supermarkets like Waitrose, adhere to RSPCA or other minimum standards which allow the turkeys a better life—my instinct is it’s unlikely this would change. If even the above has you feeling a bit unsure about your dinner, though, you can check out some of the best free range Turkey farms here.
Wine
Nightmare.Roast potatoes
Coming shortly behind the Yorkshire puddings as the most carb-focussed and therefore most important part of the roast (don’t argue), potatoes are key to the Christmas menu—if only so you can instigate heartfelt but pretentious arguments about whether they should be done in olive oil or goose fat. (Sorry, mum.)Luckily, then, they’re unlikely to suffer much from Brexit. If we imagine that the majority of the UK population decides to celebrate Christmas—the 65 per cent who self-identify as Christian, plus a variety of tinsel-delighting atheists and other theists to take us to, say, 85 per cent—and imagine that each person requires two good size potatoes with their Christmas dinner, at around 120mg per potato, then we find that the total spud footprint comes in at around 21,000 tonnes; not even a quarter of the 131,000 tonnes of potato that the UK produced in 2016.
Sprout, Brussels
“British grown Brussels sprouts in short supply this Christmas”! warned the 2016 headlines. “For the first time ever,” journalist Angela Youngman wrote in Produce Business UK, “Irish Brussels sprouts are set to appear in UK kitchens.”Britain, it turned out, had a “nightmare season” of sprouts due to cabbage moths. Could it happen again? If it does, will we need to import costly Irish Brussels sprouts—surely a nod to the good relations the Republic will likely maintain with the EU.
And even if that doesn’t happen? Well, surely a name-change is in order. Anyone for a… Bristol Sprout? Bradford? Brighton?
Hello?
Baileys
Once, as an undergraduate, me and several friends got together to make our own Irish cream (in a plastic bucket).It was a highly involved project, necessitating the purchase of Camp coffee extract and prodigious quantities of cream; the sort of project that one enjoys as a time-rich student, but would not enjoy as a time-poor—although significantly more cash-rich—grown up.
So we turn to Baileys, the premier brand of Irish cream, and find ourselves wading through sticky rivers of Brexit woe. For Baileys is one of the brands set to suffer most from the UK leaving the EU.
Some of its ingredients cross the border between Northern Ireland the Republic three times, meaning that trade agreements on the island are likely to have a significant impact on the product (and its pricing). According to one Guardian article, the Freight Transport Association warns that “nearly all food exports in Northern Ireland will be impacted.”
Where did I put my bucket?
Cheese and crackers
Ah, the cheese course. Or, rather, at Christmas, the multiple cheese courses. For if your family Christmas is anything like mine, then “a cheese course” is not limited to the dinner table.Rather, it fulfils all functions: from the lazy Christmas Eve bite consumed in front of some deliciously schmaltzy television—one heartwarming child-and-his-dog story, minimum—to something you can load a plate with late on Christmas Day, when you’re vaguely peckish but couldn’t possibly manage another meal.
It also, if we’re being honest, works as the perfect squirrelled-away snack for when one needs to steal a tiny bit of space and quiet from one’s extended family. (Sorry, everyone.)
So should we be worried about our cheese post-Brexit? Well, maybe. After all, we import a lot of it from the EU, particularly from France. And while English cheese is perfectly good, with new fancy varieties being added all the time, our milk is often transported over to Ireland to be turned into cheddar.
Add together the 60,000 tonnes of that with the 50,000 tonnes of French cheese we import each year, and Brexit may mean we have to spend more cheddar for our, er, cheddar.
If that’s not enough, we also import 35,000 tonnes of butter each year; an essential grout for the cheese on cracker construction.
Cranberries
Fresh berry imports to the EU are an intriguing subject, with the UK and Germany the biggest importers. In fact, the UK are the biggest imports of cranberries within the Union, no doubt due in part to our fondness of cranberry sauce at Christmas.So what will happen after Brexit? Well, as luck would have it, the majority of cranberry imports come from the US and Canada. If May’s government can successfully negotiate improved trade deals with the ol’ U S of A, then cranberry sauce may actually go down in cost after Brexit. Something to be cheerful about, after all.
