I watched a short Netflix profile of Magnus Nilsson, the Swedish chef whose signature dish was a retired dairy cow, and it got me thinking.
I was having a drink in the pub with my friend Jon, who happens to be an organic dairy farmer. I asked him what happens to his old girls once he’s done with them. The answer was the knacker’s yard, burgers and dog food.
So I asked him: what about taking one of your old girls, putting her out in the field to enjoy her retirement, and then doing it properly? The best butcher we could find, a curer, a chef, and a table of the people who knew her. Jon found the cow. She was 210, a lovely Friesian.
She was due to go in the spring, and then Covid hit, a few days before. The restaurants shut and 210 got a stay of execution. She had more months on the grass, and she probably tasted better for it.
Everyone involved was doing it for the first time. Jon had never eaten one of his dairy cows. The butchers had never butchered one. We paid for her with meat boxes, sold to friends and family at the school gate. The world shrank during Covid, and it felt right that we could butcher her, cure her, cook her and eat her all within five miles of the farm.
Most dairy cows don’t end up being celebrated. They end up in your ready meal, your lasagne, your meatballs, your mince. They get blended.
We live in a sanitised world where everything comes shrink-wrapped. When you take an animal’s life, there’s a certain amount of responsibility that comes with it. I didn’t want to make a film that tells you what to think about that. I wanted to show all of it, the dawn milking, the calves, the craft, the jokes, the table and the day she left the farm, and let you decide.
I’m a photographer by trade, and I wanted it to look the way it felt: first light on the herd, steam coming off the cows, the cold of the curing room, the warmth of a long lunch. And I wanted Jade at the heart of it, because nobody in this story cares more about those animals than she does.
Digby Oldridge, director
