Call me pedantic

Jonathan Church, media director for Tesco, seems to have become a little jumbled while defending the new £1.99 price of whole chickens in this BBC News article.

"We have been working hard for a while to increase the amount of higher-welfare chicken we sell." He says. But he also says that customers can be assured the chickens (and the article implies he is referring to the £1.99 birds) have been "raised in the highest welfare environment."

Really? So explain to me how are there higher-welfare chickens? Maybe it's just me, but I didn't think that higher than highest was possible.

Mo' money mo' problems

The Economist tackles the causes of the rise in food prices here:

"Increasing wealth in China and India... is stoking demand for meat in those countries, in turn boosting the demand for cereals to feed to animals. The use of grains for bread, tortillas and chapattis is linked to the growth of the world's population. It has been flat for decades, reflecting the slowing of population growth. But demand for meat is tied to economic growth and global GDP is now in its fifth successive year of expansion at a rate of 4%-plus."

Nose to Tail Eating

I'm always impressed by friends who go to St. John for the first time and order the bone marrow. My dad always said when I was little (and still says, actually), "If you go to a hamburger joint, order a hamburger." Well if you could characterise St. John by one dish it would be the roasted bone marrow on toast with parsley salad, and that's the thing to order there. It's always on the menu and in the past 13 years it has become a classic (or rather, it's been rediscovered as a classic among the London restaurant crowd.)

Bone marrow and offal in general have had some tricky years this century. Mad Cow Disease didn't help (and we shouldn't forget that beef bones were banned in the UK for some time), but I suppose it all started after the war, when people started to be able to afford to eat more meat. They stopped buying and enjoying cheaper cuts and innards which subsequently fell out of vogue, as did British cooking in general, especially in the restaurant scene. Fergus Henderson of St. John is largely credited (and I believe rightly so) with the renewed respect for British cooking, and for offal in particular.

I'm still not a real convert, so I'm not going to pretend that every time I go to St. John I have the bone marrow, or liver or tripe or any such thing. Most often I have equally delicious but less "adventurous" options. It actually took me a year of almost weekly visits to try the bone marrow, but I advise you to do as I say, not as I do. The jelly-ish interior of the veal bones has a deeply savoury flavour perfectly complemented in taste and texture by the crispy toast and fresh parsley salad. If you can't get yourself to Smithfield (or St. John Bread and Wine in Spitalfields) then check out the recipe - brought to you by one minimalist from another.

Two weeks of mourning

Foods can carry strong associations with people, time, seasons, weather, moods and places. Over years of coming up to Ontario’s cottage country for a lakeside break over the summer, my family has begun to associate the cottage with grilling, and meat in particular. We’re not always a meat-centric bunch, but something about this place (might have something to do with the oven being broken) leads us to cook outside on the barbecue daily. And this means trying to source some good meat in the Haliburton Highlands, a land of mid-sized grocery stores stocking the basics and little more.

The Butcher Block & Deli in Haliburton, Ontario, used to be our saving grace. It stocked excellent quality meats including homemade sausages and a wide range of fish. The products were not organic, or particularly local, but there was an excellent range and there were definitely people who cared behind the counter. A young man owned the store and took care to stock good cuts of high quality meat and other fine foods – it was the only place for 50 km that sold wholegrain Dijon.

The first thing on the to do list at the cottage is always a trip to the Butcher Block, so you can imagine the shock we felt when we found that our beloved shop had been replaced with a women’s clothing store. The young guy who ran it couldn’t keep it up anymore and has gone into the construction business, which is booming in the area. We might as well have worn black for the remainder of our visit, we were so upset. Our moods and insulin levels were temporarily heightened by the fantastic butter tarts at Ingoldsby Junction Buttertarts (Lower Level 177 Highland St, Haliburton, ON K0M 1S0), but the sadness returned.

In the end we ended up ferrying up meat from Toronto, from Fresh From The Farm (great sausages!) and Cumbrae's (just fantastic). We even had some Ontario lamb from the local IGA in Minden (not bad either). But it's just not the same.

Butcher Block & Deli
RIP

This little piggy ate junk food

The Food Section linked today to a highly disturbing article from the Wall Street Journal. Lauren Etter reports that due to rising demand for corn-based ethanol, a biofuel subsidized by the U.S. government, corn prices have risen so much that farmers are seeking other foodstuffs to feed their livestock. The result? Pigs and other animals are increasingly being fed "cookies, licorice, cheese curls, candy bars, french fries, frosted wheat cereal and peanut-butter cups" and other "human" junk food as a main part of their diet. Some farmers even feed piglets a "Cocoa Puffs"-like mixture of chocolate powder and cereal.

Why is this so shocking, when humans eat this stuff every day? I'm not a nutritionist, but it is generally accepted that junk food is not good for you and is only acceptable as part of a balanced diet. According to the WSJ article some farmers are using 100% "byproducts" to feed their livestock. I accept that this may be a passable way to put flesh on the bones of these animals in terms of food safety (without considering animal welfare), but I don't eat cheesies and trail mix all the time and I don't want to eat an animal that has, either.

Lauren Etter also commented that "Thanks to the ethanol rush, the price of a bushel of corn for months has hovered around $4 -- nearly double the price of a few years ago. That has prompted livestock groups like the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and the National Chicken Council to call for an end to federal ethanol subsidies, including a 51-cent-per-gallon tax credit offered to companies that blend gasoline with ethanol. For now, livestock must pay up or make do with alternatives."

Of course farmers are concerned about their bottom lines and have to maintain a profit margin, but environmentally it seems to me that the business of feeding animals junk food goes against the grain (better watch out for those puns). Is it energy efficient to feed animals highly processed food so that corn can be used to produce subsidized biofuel? I don't know.