Oliver Twist

By Justin Cohen - Friday 15th February 2008


Top chef Jamie Oliver this week moved to quash concerns that he was set to condemn shechita in a new television series after he fell victim to the latest email hoax to spark panic among Jews worldwide.

The email suggested the presenter, whose previous campaign to introduce healthier meals into British schools attracted hundreds of thousands of supporters, was now turning his attention to the Jewish method of slaughter for food in a new programme currently being filmed with Channel 4.

Top stories

email this page to a friend print this page email the editor buy this content
And while acknowledging that the details are not yet clear, it said it appears that Oliver will train to become a shochet. “Channel Four then intend to show in graphic detail the slaughter of a cow involving Oliver cutting through the jugular vein. Obviously, the spilled blood will make the practice appear cruel and inhumane without taking into account the skill and precise work of a real Shochet…If shown, the programme will be a shocking attack on religious freedom in Britain.”

The email - which emerged just a week after the government refuted a persistent internet myth that the Shoah has been removed from the curriculum - sparked a number concerned calls to community organisation in recent days. An accompanying petition designed to send a protest message to the station attracted more than 100 signatures, mainly from the UK and America.

But after being alerted by the Jewish News, a Channel 4 spokesperson
said: "There is absolutely no truth in the claim that Jamie Oliver is making, or is planning to make, a television programme about ritual slaughter, nor has he made any comments about the issue. "Whilst Jamie did look at intensive chicken production and slaughter in Jamie's Fowl Dinners, which was shown on Channel 4 in January, the programme did not examine or comment on ritual slaughter." And a spokesman for the chef added “we would never knowingly do something that would cause offence to a religious community”.

The email once again brought the issue of shechita to the forefront, two years after the government rejected a recommendation by the farm Animal Welfare Council to ban shechita which involved slaughter of an animal without pre-stunning.

Stressing that the Jewish method of slaughter for food is as humane as any other method, Board of Deputies Chief Executive Jon Benjamin said: “Email and the internet are wonderful tools but there can be a tendency for rumours and half truths to become received wisdom and myths to be taken as facts. People tend to believe what’s in an email round broken weven in spite to evidence put to them to the contrary.”

He told TJ that the email about Holocaust education in Britain had proved “very persistent” and seemed to come up every several months. “It takes quite alot of resources to scotch these things. Part of our role is to address concerns brought to us but when the same issue comes up repeatedly it’s not a good use of communal resources to have to keep answering the same point.” However, he told the Jewish News that he didn’t suppose the campaign was “malicious”, speculating that “with the current focus on poultry, someone may have decided shechita might the next target of Jamie Olivers’s campaign”.

Shimon Cohen, spokesman for Shechita UK, which was set up to defend the method following the FAWC recommendation, said: “This rumour is without foundation and was begun by irresponsible people who could so easily have checked it out, as we did, without resorting to spreading this unfounded and unhelpful gossip through the Internet.”












Read the latest copy of The Jewish News Online by clicking here.