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vegetable packing A happy beast makes a delicious dinner – so how can you be sure your meat is top notch? Nick Nairn spills the beans in our third exclusive extract from his new bookA GREAT piece of beef gets me pretty close to culinary Nirvana. I'm not the only one with this passion – demand for meat has shot up around the world since the 1950s, an appetite influenced by our growing affluence and the ready availability of a product that provides us with a wonderfully flavoursome source of protein. The big issue with all this demand, however, is that it puts pressure on farmers to increase their supply. As they cut costs, so the process becomes intensified, and more animals end up on the conveyor belt of factory farming, producing meat that's certainly cheap, but also tough and, let's face it, pretty tasteless. But there's still top-quality meat to be had, though you'll see that, as with all sectors of the food industry, the market has been split in three. At the top end, the prime motivator of production is quality, and you'll find happy, healthy beasts living a full life, facing a calm slaughter and undergoing a proper hanging and butchering process. In the middle, quality is balanced with cost, and the animals will undergo some sort of intensive process, living shorter lives, eating high-energy feeds and moving more quickly through the slaughter process. At the bottom end, cost is the only motivator, and you get into the dark and disturbing areas of mechanically recovered meat, and imports from countries with potentially dodgy practices. The vast majority of the meat we eat will have come from the middle sector, which can still produce something rather wonderful. But if you're looking for quality, let's concentrate on the best. It's what I would recommend for the roast sirloin (recipe overleaf). Try it with my red-wine gravy and Yorkshire puddings and you'll see what I mean.