Food and Labelling

I have discovered a fantastic diet. Well it worked for me, I have lost two inches off my waistline in a week. The only downside is you need to have “Man Flu” for it to work. Hey I am playing this for all the sympathy I can get, even though I know that I will not get any here. Anyway going to bed with a warm cat works wonders.

But being serious, my forced convalescence did mean that I had time to think about some of the things I have been doing. As my regular reader will know I have been trying to put together some material for a series of films to help people make better choices about food. I have filmed quite a bit of material, and I have created a style that I am happy with and I hope will also be entertaining and funny. However, as I did not want to make it elitist or condescending so I wanted to use my old existing equipment. However, visually that was not working as a couple of my old pans are tatty looking, they are more then twenty five years old. The difficulty was that on film the old pans looked dirty and unhygienic. So I decided that I needed to get a new pan or two.

Now with the announcement that Woolworth were closing down, I thought I would see if I could get them there. To go off at a tangent, I had already seen some decent pans in Woolworth a few months ago, but they were not cheep. In fact pans of the same quality were on sale in the supermarkets at a few pounds cheaper each than they were at Woolworth Therefore when Woolworth went into administration it did not surprise me. But when I went to the store in Consett to try and get the pans, they still had them and even in the clearance sale they were more expensive than other stores not having a closing down sale. So I did not get the pans there.

The following day, I went to the one in the Metro Centre, a large out of town shopping centre near here. Well there the shelves of the Woolworth there had been cleared of anything decent, what was left was telling about the state of the company. What was left on the shelves was junk, the type of products that I have long railed about as being a complete waste of resources and stuff that I just would not give up house room for. The problem is that so much of our economy has been based on selling tat that we just don't need or really want.

Anyway I still had not got the pans I wanted, so I went looking elsewhere. I found what I wanted in a small chain specialist shop. I got a salute pan, deep frying pan, and steamer. I have wanted to get one for ages in the past I had two. One my ex wife got and the other one my Ex got so need to avoid clocking up a new ex to keep this one. Also I got a boning knife. Again an item that I have wanted to get for a while, but finding a good one has been nearly impossible. I could get one that cost nearly thirty pounds, but that was far to expensive. So I was pleased to find one at under ten pounds of the same quality, in fact I think it was from the same manufacturer. Well with my pockets lighter I went home happy with the cooking equipment I have now got.

So while I will have to re-shoot some of the footage for the videos, I now have equipment that I am happy to use. Also as I have learnt from the mistakes I made initially, I really hope that I can help people to learn to cook and eat well.

It seems that my timing on this is nearly perfect as folks will know that last week there was yet another food scare regarding Irish Pork. This alerted the media to fact that quite legally many products, ready meals, pies, do not show the true country of origin for the meat. This is not just a problem in the UK or Europe as this is part of the world trade agreements. If a meat pie is made in one country then the labels only have to show that country as the country of origin. But the meat could have come from anywhere. Thus when there are safety concerns even the food industry doesn't know where the meat in the products has come from without checking records and batch numbers.

Now I may be unusual but I have always questioned when a food product is so cheep. When I see chickens for sale at three pounds, I wonder how that can be? Where have the costs been saved? Equally with prepared foods, I wonder what's in the food that makes it so cheap?

I have infuriated ex girlfriends by being a inveterate label reader. I just want to know what I am eating, and I don't blindly accept claims on the labels of food packets. But I suspect that once people start to realise that business and the food industry are feeding us the cheapest crap they can get away with, then things will change.

There needs to be a fundamental change to the way that food is treated in the developed world. I became a vegetarian when I discovered that cattle was being fed protein derived from fallen dead sheep and cattle, back in the 1970s. When I told other people of this I was told I was talking rubbish and that would never be allowed. Well when BSE emerged people discovered the truth.

Industrialised farming and the modern food industry have been quietly allowed to carry out all sorts of practices that if the public discovered what was going on would be horrified. All this is done in the guise of producing cheep food. But the real costs are hidden. In environmental damage, just think of the costs of cleaning up water due to the run off from pesticides and fertiliser. Or the costs to governments of dealing with problems like BSE (Mad Cow Disease). These practices are all about greater profit and not cheep food.

Personally I have always seen food as a joy to be enjoyed and not just as fuel to keep the body going. Further good, well produced food is much better for the environment too. I am sure that many of the health problems that impact the western developed world would be greatly reduced if only we stopped many of the perverse practices that are allowed in the food industry at the moment.