This week saw the screening of BBC3’s ‘Kill It, Cook It, Eat It‘. Over three nights an invited audience - and the viewer - witnessed the slaughter, butchery and cooking of a cow, a sheep and a pig at a real abattoir. The audience were then able to taste the meat of the animal they had just seen dispatched.

It was graphic stuff. Stuck pigs really do bleed like stuck pigs. The programmes allowed people to ‘reconnect with the source of the meat they eat’ as the earnest host, food journalist Richard Johnson, put it. That we should try to eat meat that has been humanely reared and slaughtered seems to have been the only, rather obvious, point that came out of the spectacle. A happy animal tastes better than an unhappy one and we feel better about eating it.

While the well-fed British masses agonise over their steaks, chops and fillets, in another faraway abattoir, a slaughter of a different order goes on largely unobserved. Here’s a transcript of the forthcoming ‘Kill It, Cook It, Eat It’ Iraq special.

…

RICHARD JOHNSON: Most of us love freedom. Some of us champion freedom. What very few of us do is kill for freedom. But hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are slaughtered daily on our behalf as we conveniently turn a blind eye. In fact, it seems almost essential to the process that we don’t know too much about how Iraqis are slaughtered. We’re spared the gory details.

(Shot of three Iraqis being herded up a lane)

Welcome to ‘Kill It, Cook It, Eat It’ and a democracy with a difference. Tonight freedom is on the menu. These Iraqis come from a local village.

(To audience)

Ladies and gentlemen, if I could ask you as part of the slaughter process, absolutely to maintain complete and utter silence.

Most of you will never have seen what happens inside Iraq before and you may find it upsetting. Three Iraqis are about to be slaughtered but the point of watching is to reconnect with where the freedoms we love come from.

FARMER GEORGE BUSH: I’m very proud of them. I’m rearing them to a situation where I want them to be. I wouldn’t say I get attached to them. I get used to ‘em being around but I know what their final destination is so you tend not to get attached.

RICHARD JOHNSON: This time we aren’t just going to buy and champion freedom, we’re going to see the exact process by which Iraqis become free. Now we’re joined by a government expert who’s going to talk us through the process.

GOVERNMENT EXPERT: Opinion is divided on the best way of freeing Iraqis. The current managers of the abattoir favour cluster bombs and depleted uranium. Those methods are seen as more humane than the poison gas used by the previous owner. The abattoir’s current managers, however, are trying to avert a hostile takeover by other parties who see suicide bombings as a quicker and more efficient process.

(Explosions and gunfire are heard while the camera closes in on the grimacing faces of the watching audience.)

RICHARD JOHNSON: And now I’d like invite the audience to sample these very nice sausages bought with the profits raised by privatising the Iraqi oil industry.

(First published in this week’s edition of The Friday Thing.)