No horse added

Like so many crises past and present the horse meat for beef scandal has its foundations in the quagmire of lazy consumers.  Even.After 15 year of incessant TV programmes on the pleasures if home cooking the UK is still hooked on cheap processed ready meals.   The average British housewife is hardly a paragon of virtue in the food preparation stakes!  Most people in the UK sit around the television consuming ready-made meals and dire programming with no complaint.  News that nearly 50% of us only cook with fresh ingredients once or twice a month is further evidence if our broken society.

The arts of: cooking, conversation and good manners have all gone down the Suwannee.   This rush for low cost convenience food has been killing us all gently over the last few decades, with poor health, bad parenting and obesity - three of the more obvious outcomes.  I have no sympathy for consumers who buy on price and convenience rather than on nutritional quality and value for money.  

Hopefully this mess that the UK and European food industry has got it's self into will lead to greater self-regulation (consumers not buying the cheapest possible food) rather than more regulation and cost for a broadly honest food industry.  Research tells us that the United Kingdom represents the largest share of sales of ready meals in Europe with sales of £1.85bn (about £20M has had beef replaced by horse) no wonder we are seen as a soft target by unscrupulous meat suppliers.  Market analysts were expecting the market to grow to a value of £2.7bn by 2016 .  Given the dire state of UK cuisine this seems quite likely.

Whilst the UK set to stay the largest 'prepared foods' market in Europe it would be good if we could learn from the Italians, who know the benefit of buying local ingredients, preparing a home cooked family meal and enjoying it around the kitchen table.  

Mad Cows - where's the beef

In a scandalous anti-competitive move the French banned British beef in 1996 over the CJD (Mad Cow Disease) row, up until that point France was Britain's biggest export market.  The French kept the ban in place until 2002, whereas the rest of Europe threw in the protectionist towel in 1999.  

A mad cow

Moving the clock forward to 2013 we find the French have been exporting Horse meat as a margin improving replacement for Beef.  Findus the frozen food company has been duped and it's likely many other retailers and restaurants have been buying knackered old horse insead of prime beef.  We should now ban French beef for the next six years six in retaliation.

We eat the ones you aren't riding!!

£1,000 for a chicken stew

The sky line restaurant Le Coq d'Argent has been in the news again this time they have been wasting their best burgundy.  The chefs pour Le Chambertin Grand Cru, Trapet 2009 into a chicken stew that they sell for £1,000.

They claim that this makes  ''the chicken is soft and tender, with elegantly rich and fruity undertones from the premium wine". As The Guardian says - why waste a bottle of wine that cost £250 by tipping it into the gravy!  Actually this kind of thing makes one quite ill, the message it sends out to people happy to earn £250 a week working hard is sickening.

The Guardian have the full story at -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2013/feb/07/worlds-most-expensive-food-trend

http://www.coqdargent.co.uk/offer/eat-a-1-000-coq-au-vin/1108

The really unpleasant thing about this culinary vignette is that Le Coq d'Argent has been the scene of some high profile suicides over the last couple of years.  They should think twice before promoting themselves as the restaurant of conspicuous consumption.

The site of the Restaurant

Mustang Sally

It’s time to be thankful for the string of terrible summers, which reduced the Barbeque frequency.  Without these damp and miserable summers we might have consumed a lot more hamburgers.News that a number of British supermarkets have been using Horse meat in ‘value’ hamburgers has created quite a bit of amusement in the press and twitter, two of my favourite tweets in the low  brow category are:

‘’Apparently they identified the horse meat in the Tesco burgers by analysing its D N Neigh’’.from John Prescott

Another goes - 29% of the meat content in Tesco's hamburgers turns out to be horse?! No wonder they gave me the trots!  Ho Ho! 

 

 

 

 

 

Having survived the terrors of CJD (mad cow disease) caused by feeding animal parts to cattle and sheep we now find this new pollution in our food chain.  This story also links back to the food waste story that was doing the rounds a week ago.

http://getwd50.blogspot.com/2013/01/waste-not-want-not.html

The food industry has been overly focused on volume production, from the farmers through the whole food chain the emphasis is on yields, pricing and through-put.  But the consumer is asking for something very different value, provenance, quality and choice.  We have done some limited research in our family and we have found that shopping local for your immediate needs is a much cheaper model that filling the trolley at Sainsbury.  I sense this is another nail in the coffin for our out of touch retailers and producers.