Customer: "Why's beef so dear? The chicken's a third of the price for the same weight." Butcher: "How old's the chicken?" Customer: "No idea." Butcher: "About six weeks. Hatched, fed, gone. Never saw a season." Customer: "And the bullock?" Butcher: "That one was two summers out on the hill before he came to me. Thirty months, give or take." Customer: "So I'm paying for..." Butcher: "Time. Two years of grass, rain, a farmer getting up in the dark and a field doing what fields do. The chicken's six weeks in a shed on a bag of soya." Customer: "Put like that, the chicken's the expensive one." Butcher: "Per week of life, it's the dearest thing in the shop. You're just not paying for its life. You're paying for the shed." Customer: "The beef still costs more at the till." Butcher: "Everything that takes two years costs more than everything that takes six weeks. Whisky. Cheese. Oak. Nobody stands in a distillery asking why the vodka's cheaper." Customer: "I'll have the beef." Butcher: "He'd have wanted that. He put the work in."