The Guardian is interested in seeing which labels on supermarket and processed foods gets diners to change their ways and opt for the more eco-friendly product. It spots “a different type that calculates the environmental cost”, and “how it had a surprising effect on consumers”. The test was not carried out on shoppers at Aldi or Lidl, rather at the Birmingham headquarters of the UK division of the food services business Compass Group. You might have seen their lorries dropping off bland school dinners.
It’s lunchtime at a workplace cafeteria in Birmingham, and employees returning to work after months away during the coronavirus pandemic are noticing something has changed. Next to the sandwiches and hot and cold dishes is a small globe symbol, coloured green, orange or red with a letter in the centre from A to E. “Meet our new eco-labels”, a sign reads.
Researchers at Oxford University have analysed the ingredients in every food item on the menu and given the dishes an environmental impact score, vegetable soup (an A) to the lemon, spring onion, cheese and tuna bagel (an E).
But organic and fair trade and all the other foods that have extra labels advertising their niceness cost more than those that do not. You don’t need a new label when you already have the price tag. The other solution, of course, is to tax things that don’t advertise their wellness factors and make everything more expensive, forcing us to go greener and ethical – and be more middle-class. And if you can’t afford it, well, that’s because you’re just a bad person.
Tier 2-ers can order a Scotch Egg and thus legally order alcohol to float it in. According to the rules, a Scotch egg is a “substantial meal”, something that must be ordered if you want to drink in the pub. Pubs can order or make a load of Scotch eggs and lob them at the punters. And it does not have to be large Scotch egg – containing a full hard or soft boiled egg wrapped in pork and breadcrumbs – it can be a Scotch egg of any size.
And so to a pub in London, where an order has gone in for 63 pints of beer, 12 glasses of wine and one Scotch egg:
Yeah, a Chorizo Scotch egg, which sounds revolting.
How long does the Covid-19 bug survive on sand? In readiness for Spain’s partial easing of lockdown, the beach at Zahara de los Atunes, near Cadiz on the country’s southern Atlantic coast, was sprayed with bleach. Why? Why do meddling politicians who do stupid things do anything. Yep. To “protect children”.
María Dolores Iglesias, who leads an environmental volunteer group in the Cadiz region, is not happy. She said the bleach “killed everything on the ground, nothing is seen, not even insects”.
A Member of European Parliament has inquired whether or not the country has breached EU law by using hydrogen peroxide in the processing of seafood in a bid to make it seem fresher.
Spain authorised the practice in seafood such as squid, cuttlefish and octopus in 2011, with Italian authorities following suit.
But while hydrogen peroxide is authorised as a processing aid among EU countries, it is not allowed as a food additive.
Jo Charlton post the following video of her daughter having a meltdown over the closure of fast food eateries. “Just like to add… we didn’t live off of takeaways!!! The world has ended for layla today x,” says Jo.
Just like to add… we didnt live off of takeaways!!! The world has ended for layla today x
A bacon sandwich is prepared after a study found body fat and obesity are far more closely linked to cancer than is generally realised.
Picture date: Wednesday 31 October 2007. The study found strong evidence that red meat and processed meats were a cause of bowel cancer. Examples included ham, bacon, pastrami, salami, and frankfurters. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Photo credit should read: Anthony Devlin/PA
Ref #: PA.5297529
Date: 31/10/2007
The BBC reports on a report in the Financial Timeswhich alleges a City trader at Investment bank Citigroup was allegedly suspended for “stealing food from the staff canteen”. You will, of course have noticed the caveats in that opening line. The trader earns, reportedly, over £1m a year – more than enough to afford a pricey lawyer. Allegedly. It is alleged “he helped himself to sandwiches from the canteen at the bank’s London headquarters”.
On the Wisbech Discussion Forum news: who posted a ham sandwich through a man’s door? “Right I’m not happy!,” says Mr Brazil. “Whoever has put a ham sandwich in my letterbox, I suggest you come and retrieve it now before I go to the authorities. You have 10 mins…”
These are the 28 animals identified by the South China Morning Post for sale at the Huanan (Wuhan) market in China. Many animals do not feature. And the thinking is why not? If you can eat camel and donkey, why not llama or flamingo? And are Hoxton’s hipsters lagging, sticking to ostrich, emu and crocodile when those food-forward Chinese are dining on Asian badger, otter and scorpion? As the West weeps over footage of the burnt Australian wildlife, are Chinese sympathies fogged by the scent of roast koala?
Best served accompanied by a young Robin with a Penguin chaser
Some science suggests the coronavirus spreading in China started in bats served at the aforementioned Wuhan market. Analysis shows the virus’s genetic makeup is 96% identical to that of a coronavirus found in bats. “I would be very surprised if this were a snake virus,” says Timothy Sheahan, a virologist at the University of North Carolina. Bats were also the ultimate source of SARS, scientists believe.
“evil! Chinese eat bat – movie exposure, ” says a headline to an Apple News story shared by the Daily Mail. The videofeatures a woman eating bat soup. Why eating bat should be evil and, say, eating newborn lamb the stuff of daytime telly cooking shows and Easter treats is moot, moreover eating kangaroo testicles for slots of entertainment dished up between ads for insurance, holidays and mobile phones?
But war with the bats has begun. And you need to pick sides. (I’ll have a side of chicken wings and foie gras.)
The Italian newspaper La Sicilia reports on a local chef arrested on suspicion of drugs dealing. The chef claimed he was testing out “new flavours”, and the two large marijuana plants and 1kg (35oz) of Indian hemp in his pantry were part of his dabbling in cannabis-infused wine, olives, coffee and tuna – all items also seized from his home near Catania.
The 50-year-old is a self-billed “agro-food consultant for third millennium cuisine”.
Meanwhile, you know ‘weed’ you bought from the guy who works in the kitchens, well, it’s oregano – probably.
Like most of you, I’ve got Tango-induced tinnitus. But I won’t be getting DailyLea eye because the advert in which a woman is hit in the face by the cheese has been banned. The BBC says: ‘Parents of children with dairy allergies said it was “dangerous”, “disgraceful” and “insensitive”.’
On parent is Rina Cheema. Her son Karanbir “died after cheese was thrown at him at school in London in June 2017”.
A food fight can result in a fight for life. Why didn’t anyone tell the milkshakers? “Milkshaking’s power lies in the sheer ridiculousness of the situation,” said Vice, which featured instruction on how to make a milkshake to throw at someone with whom you disagree. “Someone’s thrown a milkshake at you! A milkshake! That’s silly as hell!”
Hear about the boy “blinded by chips and sausages”? Or as the BBC’s headline puts it, a little more accurately: “Teenager ‘blind’ from living off crisps and chips.”
The tabloid’s headline conjures all kinds of images (see above). But the story is less bizarre. The 17-year-old has long-standing eating issues for which he sought help. And for that we can only feel sympathy. Things got so bad that the lack of nutrients affected his vision. His diet is a composite mix of: French fries, Pringles, white bread, the occasional slice of ham or a sausage.
Truth is that the sausage might well be the heartiest thing he ate. Sausage did not make the teenager blind.
The boy’s visit to the Bristol Eye Hospital is recorded in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Dr Denize Atan, who treated him at the hospital, notes: “His diet was essentially a portion of chips from the local fish and chip shop every day. He also used to snack on crisps – Pringles – and sometimes slices of white bread and occasional slices of ham, and not really any fruit and vegetables. He explained this as an aversion to certain textures of food that he really could not tolerate, and so chips and crisps were really the only types of food that he wanted and felt that he could eat. He had blind spots right in the middle of his vision. That means he can’t drive and would find it really difficult to read, watch TV or discern faces. He can walk around on his own though because he has got peripheral vision.”
Sausages are innocent. Mental health should not be mocked.
Yorkshireman Haddon Salt run a fish and chips empire that in the 1960s exceeded 500 stores. Kentucky Fried Chicken noticed the immigrant’s success. In 1969 the chicken mongers bought all of the H. Salt, Esq. Authentic English Fish and Chips outlets. The NY Times:
An initial Google search revealed that this shop was the last gasp of a once-sprawling fish-and-chips empire with hundreds of locations that started with an immigrant’s secret family recipe, flourished into an eight-figure deal with Colonel Sanders and ended in collapse.
It took several years and the research help of friends to track down Mr. Salt. We found him in a remote retirement community in Southern California’s desert. The rest you can see in the film before you.
For every icon there are those who were almost famous. And perhaps they, even more than their conqueror, have the lessons we need to hear.
Image: H. Salt Fish and Chips restaurant on Vineland Ave. in North Hollywood.
To the Soho Vegan Food Market in Rupert Street, London, where Deonisy Khlebnikov, 22, and Gatis Lagzdins, 29, are biting chunks of raw, dead squirrel. One of them wears a T-shit carrying the message “Veganism = malnutrition”.
Fast forward a few months and at City of London Magistrates’ the men deny using disorderly behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress. Lagzdins is fined £400 plus costs and a surcharge, while Khlebnikov is fined £200 plus costs and a surcharge for.
Natalie Clines, from the CPS, goes on the record:
“Deonisy Khlebnikov and Gatis Lagzdins claimed they were against veganism and were raising awareness about the dangers of not eating meat when they publicly consumed raw squirrels. But by choosing to do this outside a vegan food stall and continuing with their disgusting and unnecessary behaviour despite requests to stop, including from a parent whose child was upset by their actions, the prosecution was able to demonstrate that they had planned and intended to cause distress to the public. Their pre-meditated actions caused significant distress to members of the public, including young children.”
There’s a time and a place for eating squirrels, especially the invasive grey ones. The BBC has included recipes for squirrel on its website. An enthusiast “walked us through all the steps involved in hunting, cleaning and transforming a North American grey squirrel into a delicious stew”. Tree rat a la mode.
“This is my father’s collection of cheese labels from the 1940s and 50s,” says Londoner Julian Tysoe, whose mini museum can be seen on Flashbak. Julian’s father, John Jeremy ‘Gus’ Tysoe (26 August 1938 – 25 September 2016) also wrote letters to the great English animator Oliver Postage (Ivor the Engine, Noggin’s the Nog and more). They discussed chess, Tolkien, accountants and more.
Is McDonald’s chasing the authentic farm-to-table experience by smearing poo on its touchscreen monitors, Touch. Inhale. And in an instant you’re cow-side at the farm. Metro reports on findings by the London Metropolitan University whose researchers found fecal matter on every touchscreen they tested across eight different McDonald’s restaurants – six in London and two in Birmingham. On all screens the researchers found coliforms – bacteria found in digestive tracts and turds.
Paul Matewele, a microbiology lecturer at London Metropolitan University, is quoted: “Touchscreen technology is being used more and more in our daily lives but these results show people should not eat food straight after touching them. They are unhygienic and can spread disease. Someone can be very careful about their own hygiene throughout the day but it could all be undone by using a touchscreen machine once.”
No proof that it has. But the theory is there. Maybe McDonald’s customers should be sheep-dipped on entry and exit? And is eight screens a big test? Surely not. McDonald’s operates approximately 1300 restaurants in the UK of which around 1100 are franchised. The Metro doesn’t say who owns the eateries the researchers checked. McDonald’s says it said cleans the self-order screens throughout the day. Sadly it doesn’t clean its patrons.
This research is thinner than, well, anyone who eats at a McDonald’s. The fact is that anywhere where people touch things without first washing their hands thoroughly present a risk of contamination. Why else do you think Ronald McDonald wears gloves?
F. Scott Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896–December 21, 1940) – will now offer 13 ways to reuse your Thanksgiving turkey. The writers says the recipes were harvested from “old cook books, yellowed diaries of the Pilgrim Fathers, mail order catalogues, golf-bags and trash cans. Not one but has been tried and proven — there are headstones all over America to testify to the fact”.
Eat at cook’s own risk:
Turkey Cocktail: To one large turkey add one gallon of vermouth and a demijohn of angostura bitters. Shake.
Turkey à la Francais: Take a large ripe turkey, prepare as for basting and stuff with old watches and chains and monkey meat. Proceed as with cottage pudding.
Turkey and Water: Take one turkey and one pan of water. Heat the latter to the boiling point and then put in the refrigerator. When it has jelled, drown the turkey in it. Eat. In preparing this recipe it is best to have a few ham sandwiches around in case things go wrong.
Turkey Mongole: Take three butts of salami and a large turkey skeleton, from which the feathers and natural stuffing have been removed. Lay them out on the table and call up some Mongole in the neighborhood to tell you how to proceed from there.
Turkey Mousse: Seed a large prone turkey, being careful to remove the bones, flesh, fins, gravy, etc. Blow up with a bicycle pump. Mount in becoming style and hang in the front hall.
Stolen Turkey: Walk quickly from the market, and, if accosted, remark with a laugh that it had just flown into your arms and you hadn’t noticed it. Then drop the turkey with the white of one egg—well, anyhow, beat it.
Turkey à la Crême: Prepare the crême a day in advance. Deluge the turkey with it and cook for six days over a blast furnace. Wrap in fly paper and serve.
Turkey Hash: This is the delight of all connoisseurs of the holiday beast, but few understand how really to prepare it. Like a lobster, it must be plunged alive into boiling water, until it becomes bright red or purple or something, and then before the color fades, placed quickly in a washing machine and allowed to stew in its own gore as it is whirled around. Only then is it ready for hash. To hash, take a large sharp tool like a nail-file or, if none is handy, a bayonet will serve the purpose—and then get at it! Hash it well! Bind the remains with dental floss and serve.
Feathered Turkey: To prepare this, a turkey is necessary and a one pounder cannon to compel anyone to eat it. Broil the feathers and stuff with sage-brush, old clothes, almost anything you can dig up. Then sit down and simmer. The feathers are to be eaten like artichokes (and this is not to be confused with the old Roman custom of tickling the throat.)
Turkey à la Maryland: Take a plump turkey to a barber’s and have him shaved, or if a female bird, given a facial and a water wave. Then, before killing him, stuff with old newspapers and put him to roost. He can then be served hot or raw, usually with a thick gravy of mineral oil and rubbing alcohol. (Note: This recipe was given me by an old black mammy.)
Turkey Remnant: This is one of the most useful recipes for, though not, “chic,” it tells what to do with the turkey after the holiday, and how to extract the most value from it. Take the remnants, or, if they have been consumed, take the various plates on which the turkey or its parts have rested and stew them for two hours in milk of magnesia. Stuff with moth-balls.
Turkey with Whiskey Sauce: This recipe is for a party of four. Obtain a gallon of whiskey, and allow it to age for several hours. Then serve, allowing one quart for each guest. The next day the turkey should be added, little by little, constantly stirring and basting.
For Weddings or Funerals: Obtain a gross of small white boxes such as are used for bride’s cake. Cut the turkey into small squares, roast, stuff, kill, boil, bake and allow to skewer. Now we are ready to begin. Fill each box with a quantity of soup stock and pile in a handy place. As the liquid elapses, the prepared turkey is added until the guests arrive. The boxes delicately tied with white ribbons are then placed in the handbags of the ladies, or in the men’s side pockets.
Kuwait has issues with fish. I July this year, the Kuwait Times reported on fishmongers selling fish with nails into increase their weight and price. women complained of crunchy fish, the seller was convicted of fraud.
More facts should we get them. (How we hope the story of the googly fish is true.)
To Queens, New York, where a man marking Father’s Day at the Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden with his daughter and granddaughter is chewing on his grub. Yum. That mayo and onions on his burger a scrumptious. And it’s juicy too, what with the added ingredient: spit.
Curtis Mays noticed that his bill included the direction: “PLEASE SPIT IN IT TOO.” Mays complained. He’s no picky eater asking for this and that. Just serve the dead cow as it comes.
The manager was called. The waitress was fired. Mays got a free meal. If you don’t want spit in your meal, please ask:
Crisis in Venezuela. A Mis-managed economy has created poverty from riches.
Venezuela’s government has urged citizens to see rabbits as more than “cute pets” as it defended a plan to breed and eat them – even as the opposition says this would do nothing to end chronic food shortages.
The questions must be: what do you feed the rabbits; and how do you cook them?
President Nicolás Maduro went on telly to tell the people that “for animal protein, which is such an important issue, a ‘rabbit plan’ has been approved because rabbits also breed like rabbits”.
As we’ve noted, its not rabbits you need, it’s pigeons, feral ones. In Exeter, England, vagrants are catching the vermin for food. It turn out that when you kill a feral pigeon, more replace it. As Trafford Council notes:
…for most pigeon problems, lethal methods are totally ineffective. They simply reduce competition for food and shelter, and the remaining birds increase their breeding rates to compensate. Although there is an immediate decrease, numbers soon recover, resulting in an endless cycle of killing and re-population.
And eating, too.
And there’s another problem with rabbits: they are adorable. Mr Freddy Bernal, the country’s minister of urban agriculture, says that lots of rabbits were given to communities to breed for food. “A lot of people gave names to the rabbits, they took them to bed,” says Mr Bernal.
And lots more can go wrong when you rear rabbit. “Rabbits were introduced to Australia as part of a broad attempt by early colonists to make Australia as much like Europe as they possibly could,” says Greg Mutze, research officer at the Department of Water, Land and Biodiversity Conservation in South Australia. “It was hoped that they would flourish so that the owners could hunt them.” By the 1920s, Australia’s rabbit population had reached to 10 billion.
Can it proven that fast food makes you fat? Researchers at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) examined 1,500 state primary school pupils aged four to 11, looking at their postal addresses and weight. Turns out that the kids living closer to fast food outlets – within around half a mile – were more likely than their peers to gain weight during the primary school years.
This is, of course, all about protecting children from being fat – a physical state that once marked you as jolly but now casts you as a mentally negligible victim.
So can it proven that fast food makes you fat and is a danger to children’s health? Or is this more about correlation than causation? Poorer people eat the most fast food. Relocate the eateries, or make them sell just salads and watch the fatties slim down. Or better yet, turn the fried chicken shacks into gyms and therapy suites.
And what of the business angle? If you’re going to open a fast food franchise or fish and chip restaurant, you’ll do best locating where poorer people live and the rents are cheaper. Unsurprisingly, the study noted a higher density of fast food outlets – i.e. cheap food – in poorer areas.
In July, Cambridge University’s Centre for Diet and Activity Research counted 56,638 takeaways in England. And it too noted that fast food shops are more prevalent in England’s poorest areas.
NHS employee Matthew Pearce, who led the research, tells media: “We know from national data that the number of children classified as obese doubles between the first and last year of primary school. Understanding the reasons for this is important to protect the future health of children. Obesity is driven by many complex factors. Our study adds to existing evidence that the neighbourhood environment plays an important role in the development of obesity.”
“While ultimately it is down to individuals on how they choose to live, it is widely accepted that we live in environments that make managing our weight increasingly difficult,” Pearce adds. “We therefore need national and local policymakers to take decisions that support more favourable conditions that enable people to eat healthier and become more physically active.”
So what’s the plan, then? Put simply: tell the idiots how to live. Much harder to implement is the other plan: let’s get richer.
Having stopped a car being driven by Roy Tilbott, 51, Wyoming police spotted a few eyeballs on the road close to where the suspect was standing. They seemed to have have slid down from somewhere inside Tilbott’s shorts.
When challenged at gunpoint, Tilbott told police the eyeballs were not human, rather cow eyeballs he’d stolen from Johnson Meats (a slaughterhouse) where he worked as a butcher.
“Company won’t let us take animal scraps home and instead toss them in the landfill,” said Tilbott according to the police report. “They’re a very wasteful company. We should be allowed to take scrap meat and other parts home. The company should start a green initiative. They don’t even have recycling at the plant. I enjoy eating bovine eyeballs and smuggling them out in my colon was the only way I knew how to get them out without potentially getting caught and fired. I put them in soups. They’re beneficial for erectile dysfunction, which I currently battle, but I also just like the texture and taste.”
Tilbott was breathalyzed and arrested for driving under the influence. He was also in possession of a number of large carving knives. Police don’t know what else to charge Tilbott with because no theft has been reported.
