It must have been one hell of a pitch to the BBC. “Okay – we kill a pig. Then we eat it. Next night, we kill a chicken. Then we eat it. Every night of the week, we kill a different animal. Then we eat it. With an omnibus on the Friday. What do you say?” The BBC said yes, and asked me to present it. I agreed, but when I talked to friends about the programme (working title, Kill It, Cook It, Eat It) they just laughed, and said “It’s a spoof, right?”. They were lucky I didn’t eat them. Maybe series two.

Kill It, Cook It, Eat It couldn’t be more serious. In a world where meat comes pre-packed, in plastic, Kill It, Cook It, Eat It was designed to reconnect us with what we’re eating. It was filmed in an abbatoir, but an abbatoir with a difference – there was a restaurant built onto the end. It had windows installed, so that the diners could see what was going on, but the abbatoir’s day-to-day workings weren’t interrupted at all. The diners witnessed the slaughter – and then ate the meat for their dinner.

Mettricks, an abbatoir just outside Manchester, is an exemplary sort of place. If it smells of anything, it smells of bleach. It is a Best Practice abbatoir, and animal welfare is a top priority. It’s small, so the slaughtermen don’t rush the animals through like they’re on a production line, and the whole process is overseen by a vet from the Meat Hygiene Service. If you can’t cope with Mettricks, you shouldn’t be eating meat. Mettricks is as good as it gets.

Steve Mettrick is a slaughterman with compassion – he can’t kill calves, for instance, because he gets upset with the way they lick his hands. He makes sure to minimise the stress. He has installed non-slip floors in the abbatoir, and blocked off the animal’s view of an escape route. But not just for welfare reasons – a relaxed animal tastes better. Meat from a tense animal is discoloured or soft, and spoils more quickly because of the hormones secreted at the time of the killing.

John Mettrick is in charge of the butchery side of the family business. He wants to change Britain’s buying habits. He can sell all the fillet steak he can get hold of. But not the skirt. Or the oxtail. And he says we need educating. When the Gascons presented Tony Blair with a spirited pony called Justin, Blair got confused. “I didn't know whether to ride it or eat it” he said. Eat it. In Gascony, you won’t offend anyone by eating anything. And these days, we need to learn from the French.

I used to be a vegetarian. Admittedly I was more of a health-vegetarian than a pain-and-suffering vegetarian or a could-better-feed-world-without-wasting-resouces-on-animal-flesh vegetarian, but I didn’t eat meat for 16 years. Then I got bored. I had never worked out how to make vegetables sing on the plate. And, increasingly, they seemed to lack a real sense of purpose unless they were accompanied by a bit of meat. So, one day, I just became a carnivore again.

But the guilt never left me. And when I filmed the slaughter of a bullock, for BBC 2’s Full on Food, I cried. It felt like a Biblical experience – something was dying so that I might live – and it changed the way I thought about meat. I decided that if I was going to eat meat again, I would need to know how the animal had lived, and how it had died. The programme director just tutted. He looked straight at me and said, ‘For God’s sake, it’s only a bloody cow.”

His reaction is pretty typical. But there are others out there who want to know more about where their food comes from. It’s all about ‘transparency’. I’ve been banging on about ‘menu transparency’ for years, but most restaurants still haven’t got the faintest idea what they’re serving. And if it means training the staff to answer queries about the provenance of their meat, I don’t hold out much hope. Most of them don’t even know what the soup of the day is.

For the duration of Kill It, Cook It, Eat It, we stayed in a hotel with a view of the dual carriageway. The waitress in the restaurant had no idea where the bacon was from. She thought, maybe, it was British. I thought, maybe, that it wasn’t. Two-thirds of the bacon imported into the UK would be illegal to produce here. The conditions would be too cruel. And Danish farmers, for instance, are routinely feeding pig fat back to their own pigs. They’re cannibalising their animals. It feels like BSE never happened.

There are farmers out there who are feeding their cattle genetically-modified maize. Given a choice, I don’t want to eat genetically-modified anything. Not until I’m sure it won’t end up genetically modifying me. But it’s difficult to find out what’s what. Buying British is a good, basic guarantee when it comes to meat, but buying British and organic is even better. Only then can you guarantee that animals have been fed on a diet, that is gm free, and raised with a high standard of welfare.

Kill It, Cook It, Eat It is a difficult series to get right – especially in the shift from abbatoir to restaurant. The series producer shouted down my earpiece, ‘Can you smile a bit more?’. But smiling just never seemed the right thing to do. I didn’t even smile in the BBC publicity shots. I just thought that, if the TV Times ask for a picture, and run a caption thats read something like “an in-depth look at the slaughtering process”, and I’m there, grinning away, who looks the Muppet?

In India, a mother dips her finger in honey and writes the Om symbol on the tongue of her new-born baby. Om means “I am” – it’s a nice image to illustrate that, in a metaphyiscal and a physical sense, we are what we eat. In Britain, if we really are what we eat, we’re in deep trouble. After all, we have lurched from food scare to food scare – from Sudan 1 to BSE. We should start by understanding our meat a bit better. That’s what Kill It, Cook It, Eat It is all about. Something to smile about, I suppose.

In 21st century Britain, eating is an increasingly political act. Sustainability. Food miles. Organics. Footprints. The slow food movement, pesticides, obesity……….Politics with a capital P.