Alastair Little, the chef, had an uncomfortable weekend after watching television reports about William Waldegrave, the Agriculture Minister, selling calves from his farm to the continental veal trade. "I couldn't stop thinking about it," he says. "It made me very uneasy."
He was not the only one to squirm in his armchair at the images of tiny calves, taken from their mothers to spend the last six months of their lives packed into crates, where they will be denied natural light and movement, deprived of straw for bedding, and force-fed a liquid diet to keep their flesh iron-free and milky white.
The veal crate system has been illegal here since 1990, but there is nothing to stop calves being raised in crates abroad and then sold back to Britain. Most veal on sale in supermarkets comes from British calves exported to Holland.
Mr Little says that he does not serve white veal meat, but admits to serving ossobucco and calves' kidneys. "The public has a blind spot about it. They don't want to eat veal but don't seem to realise that all this comes from the same animal. Veal offal is certainly crate fed."
The problem is that veal is far more popular in France and Italy than in Britain. "They pay more for the best cuts there, which means that we are eating an animal that not only has been treated cruelly, but is of poor quality," Mr Little says.
Albert Roux, French doyen of Le Gavroche restaurant, buys only free-range veal: "I myself will never buy veal put into crate," he says. "I only buy an animal that is guaranteed to come from under the mother." He is still killing baby animals, however. "Everybody has to die at some date," says M Roux with equanimity. "They should just all lead a happy life before they do."
Mr Little is unconvinced by the merits of free-range veal. "I have had problems with it in the past," he says. "Often suppliers have been unreliable.
In any case, free-range veal does not have the bland, slightly fishy taste that customers want. "The whole point about veal is that it doesn't taste of anything," says Nigel Slater, the cookery writer. "Free-range meat's redder, the flavour's stronger and the whole thing tastes a bit like pork." Veal from free-range calves has a slightly gelatinous texture, and was once a common ingredient in traditional British dishes such as veal and ham pies.
Taste is one consideration, business is another. "It's difficult to be politically correct when you're buying meat and I can be a bit amoral," says Mr Little nervously. "I make desultory efforts to buy free-range pork and chicken, but if free-range is prohibitively expensive, then you can't do it."
Stephen Bull, who owns three London restaurants with a reputation for meat and offal dishes, says that he, too, rarely serves veal, although sweetbreads appear regularly on the menu. "We don't apply any serious criteria to veal," he says. "We buy it from very responsible suppliers and we do ask them where they get it from. But because we buy so little we don't actually go to the source."
So does Mr Bull serve crate-fed veal? "Not if we can avoid it," he says. "But we have to occasionally because of the exigencies of a menu that changes daily. We also serve hare sometimes, which is unfortunate because it's an animal that pair-bonds and you have to take one away from its mate, or when we cook crayfish we have to throw it live into boiling water."
Many supermarkets no longer sell veal, because of lack of demand. But however much the British public vote with their wallets for the humane treatment of calves, the fact remains that cows can only produce milk if they are injected with chemicals or become pregnant. The latter, more palatable, option litters the fields of England with knock-kneed babies that have to be controlled somehow. If no one wants them to be slaughtered at home then they will have to be sent abroad. "If we want to drink milk and eat butter, we will have to accept that we face being overrun by calves that will eat us out of house and home," says Mr Little.
Yet despite the practicalities of the situation, veal is still the flesh that many fully-fledged carnivores shun, the meat that gets the docile folk of Shoreham baying for human blood. Why should we care more about calves than about intensively farmed pigs or battery hens? Mr Slater thinks part of it is sentimentality. "A calf is a big, fluffy animal with huge eyes," he says. "But it is also because veal farming has always attracted a lot of publicity; it was only recently that people found out what was happening to other animals."
Even Jonathan Meades, the restaurant critic of The Times who once said he would eat anything with the possible exception of humans, admits to a moment's misgiving when he orders veal. "I suppose one feels vaguely uneasy about it, but only very vaguely. About 0.5 per cent," he says, lighting a high-tar cigarette.
"The animal rights body is so preposterous it forces you to play devil's gastronome. The English preoccupation is crazy. I don't think there's any other country which shows this queasiness, it's a terribly British attitude. It's because Britain doesn't have any gastronomy - the so-called food revolution only affects 10 per cent of the population. We are a formerly Protestant country with a hangover that has never gone away. The fuss that's made over animals here compared with humans is indicative of some terrible malaise."
His unease over veal, Mr Meades adds hastily, is to do with the quality of the meat, not the treatment of the animals. "I'm not advocating gratuitous cruelty but animals don't have rights. They are not sentient beings. I feel unhappy about intensively farmed stuff because it tastes so dreadful. Veal in this country is insipid to the point where it's not worth eating."
