If you’re thinking of having lamb for your celebration lunch, you might want to think again, says Clare Finney – unless you’re not bothered about seasonality, food miles and messing up the animals’ natural breeding cycles
PHOTOGRAPH: ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES
It’s obvious when you stop to think about it. In these bright, dewy months, when we venture back outside for country walks, when we coo at newborn lambs stumbling on spindly legs after their mothers… Spring is traditionally the time when lambs are born, not when they’re slaughtered. The term ‘spring lamb’ actually refers to lambs born on spring pastures, but the term’s been co-opted to sell lamb at Easter. Right now, lambs should be suckling, not roasting with rosemary and thyme.
But hang on, I hear you say, isn’t lamb a tradition at Easter, going back hundreds of years? Well, sort of. It’s a traditional part of the feast for Passover, the Jewish spring festival that takes place around the same time. But that originated in the Middle East, which has quite a different climate to Britain, thousands of years before modern definitions of what is or isn’t lamb. The practice of eating lamb at Easter was adopted in this country when the decline of the wool trade encouraged sheep farmers to create a new market.