Chef Will Devlin and farmer Tom Cunningham Co-star in ‘Rooting for Real Farms’ Video Series

Will has won numerous awards including Kent Chef of the Year and Kent’s Best Restaurant of the year, as well as the Good Food Guide’s chef to watch and a Green Michelin Star for his restaurant The Smallholding near Kilndown, Cranbrook. Will is filmed making the case for better meat as he prepares a delicious pork recipe, and the reasons why he only ever sources meat from high welfare farms that ensure the humane treatment of the animals that are free to have a more natural life, allowing them to grow slowly healthily and happily to produce meat with a superior taste and texture.

He sources his pork from Tom Cunningham who runs the local 500-acre Pure Meat Company farm. Tom and his brother raise free-range English Longhorn cattle, rare-breed Tamworth pigs and Romney sheep that graze, root and forage outdoors, producing top quality slow-raised meat, reared gently and sustainably in the heart of Kent. The farmland is made up of permanent pasture, 100 acres of wildflower meadows, most of which have never been ploughed, dense hedgerows and ancient woodlands.

Will and Tom join other leading UK foodies including chefs Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Clodagh McKenna, Gill Meller, Olia Hercules, and Ching He Huang, as well as actor Dominic West, who ‘turn their noses up’ at factory farmed pork and support high welfare local farmers. A national alliance of farmers, food enthusiasts and animal welfare campaigns, including the Soil Association and Sustainable Food Trust, share the videos to promote their campaigns for a local, high welfare food system.

Chef Will Devlin says ~ “The marbling in the pork from the Pure Meat Company is a sign of an animal that has been reared really well. The flavour is amazing, we get a lot of comments from people saying they’ve never tried pork like this before. Once we started on this journey of using outdoor reared meat we never changed. I think that once you find out some of the other practices involved in farming it makes you start questioning what you’re eating and for us what we’re going to cook for our guests.”

Farmer Tom Cunningham of the Pure Meat Company says ~ “There is a huge difference between our pigs and factory farmed pigs which have a lack of light, fresh air, and everything pigs need to live happily and healthily is taken away in a factory farming situation. They're overcrowded living on concrete, so bored and stressed they bite each other’s tails off. None of that happens here. All our pigs have curly tails which means they’re happy.”

Tracy Worcester, Director of Farms Not Factories says ~ “Leaving the European Union should mean signing trade deals that raise our food and farming standards rather than facilitate a race to the bottom with global corporations capturing and centralising production, slaughtering, processing, distribution and retail. Corporate monopolies are ill suited to food and farming as they increase animal cruelty, environmental pollution and the destruction of rural economies. We need to re diversify and localise our food system to allow farmers to raise their standards of food safety, animal welfare, and environmental protection and give them a fair price.”