There is a strange amount of trust involved in buying meat, possibly more so than almost any other staple.

We pick up a packet of beef, pork or chicken and, for the most part, take what is written on the front at face value. British. Grass-fed. Free-range. Outdoor-bred. Farm assured. Perhaps there is an image of a field, a flag, or an animal standing somewhere green. From those few words and images, we build a picture. We imagine where that animal lived, what it ate and perhaps even the kind of farm it came from. But how much of that picture is actually guaranteed? Sometimes rather less than we might think…

Origin is probably the most obvious place to start. If meat is labelled British, there are rules around what that means, but knowing the country an animal came from is still only one small part of its story.

Two pieces of British beef can have been produced in extraordinarily different ways.

One animal might have spent much of its life grazing diverse pasture on a small mixed farm, with hedgerows, trees and wildlife woven through the landscape. Another may have come from a much more intensive system, eating a very different diet and living a very different life. Both can still be British.

When it comes to processed meat, such as staples like sausages and burgers, a British flag only tells you part of the story. Only some of the ingredients or part of the processing has to happen on British shores. There is a very famous sausage widely available on supermarket shelves that undergoes a world tour before landing on our shelves. While the pork itself is reared on British farms, once slaughtered the meat is sent to the EU for processing and turning into sausages. The sausages are loaded into natural beef casings that can have come from countries as far and wide as Argentina, Brazil or the EU. It returns to the UK packed and labelled as British. The product itself professes to be of high ethical standards, yet the environmental cost of its processing, one could argue, outweighs a lot of the claims made in the packet.

Supporting British farmers matters enormously, but nationality alone isn't a farming or production system, and due to clever marketing it is easy to mistake it for one.

This is where buying meat becomes particularly confusing. We have become very good at attaching lovely-sounding language to food.

Grass-fed.
Outdoor-bred.
Farm assured.
Natural.
Traditionally reared.

Some of these terms have specific definitions or are attached to particular standards, others tell you far less than you might reasonably assume.

Grass-fed beef is a good example. Most cattle in Britain eat grass at some point in their lives. Calling beef "grass-fed" can therefore create an image of cattle spending their lives grazing pasture, while telling you surprisingly little about the entirety of their diet or how they were actually farmed. An animal only has to eat 51% of its diet to be classed as ‘grass-fed’.

That is very different from cattle raised on a genuinely pasture-based system, where grass and forage form the basis of their diet throughout their lives. The distinction sounds small on a packet, yet on a farm the impact is enormous.

Food marketing understands exactly what we associate with good farming; green fields, happy animals and muddy boots. Those images are powerful because they mean something to us. They suggest care, space, nature and a connection between the animal and the landscape, but a picture of a field isn't provenance. Neither is a rustic typeface or the name of a farm-style brand.

The question we should be asking is ‘What does the product truly tell me?’

Can I find out where the animal was raised? Do I know anything about the farming system?

What did the animal eat?

Was it actually outdoors and for how much of its life?

Who produced it?

Is there a meaningful certification behind the claims being made?

And, perhaps most importantly, can I trace the meat back to a real farm or farmer?

This is one of the reasons we built Pipers & Co around personally knowing the farms we buy from. Not because every farmer needs to have a beautifully curated story attached to them, but because there should be a real person and a real farming system behind the food that our customers can trust.

When we sell beef, I want everyone to know where those cattle grazed. I want our customers to understand how that farmer manages their land, what the animals eat and why they farm in the way they do. That relationship isn't just nice storytelling, for us, it’s proper accountability.

We need more of that in today’s food systems. Sadly, the longer and more complicated a supply chain becomes, the harder it is for the person buying the end product to understand how it was produced and the easier it is for retailers to soften some of the hard edges with quaint sounding words. Meat can move through processors, wholesalers and retailers before it reaches consumers at home, while the farming story becomes increasingly distant and in some cases more palatable along the way.

A short supply chain doesn't automatically make food good, but it makes asking questions considerably easier.

You don't need to interrogate your butcher every time you want sausages, but we should all become slightly more curious consumers.

Look beyond the biggest words on the front of the packet. Learn what terms such as "outdoor-bred", "free-range", "grass-fed" and "100% grass-fed" really mean rather than relying on what they appear to mean.

And when you can, buy from people who can tell you where their meat came from.

A good butcher should know.

A good farm shop should know.

And any businesses selling meat on the basis of provenance and farming standards should be able to tell you too in real detail.

Ultimately, if we are going to eat animals, I think we have a responsibility to be interested in the lives behind the meat. Not just whether something says British or grass-fed on the label, but what those words actually represent.

The best meat shouldn't need an imaginary farm created by a marketing department. There should be a real one behind it, worth knowing and celebrating for all its muddy realness.