Hello and welcome to this new Web Log. While I have been keeping a Blog for a number of years, inadvertently food and food issues has often slipped into those postings. Therefore I decided I really needed to create a dedicated web log for these issues and topics.
I know that here on the Inter-web thingy, there are lots of resources about food and food issues, this contrasts with the food desert of the former mining village in North East England, that I live in. While there are food shops in the village, they cater for the “Cant cook and Wont Cook” brigade. Therefore even when I first moved to the village I struggled to even find some decent tea. While I mainly drink a standard blend, just like the majority of people, I also enjoy specialist tea such as Darjeeling and Assam and while I was prepared to order these and support local businesses, they were not prepared to get these in even when they had at least one customer wanting the item.
To my mind it was rather bizarre to have a business refusing trade. The one gem appeared to be a greengrocer in the village. However, the quality was often dubious. While I persisted buying what I could from them, it became clear that their buying policy was to buy what was cheapest in the market no matter how poor the quality. While I do understand that the village is in an area of outstanding poverty and has a high number of unemployed people, rubbish is still rubbish no matter how cheap it is. Further, as I got to know other people in the village, I realised that I was not alone in this view. There were many people who would rather pay to travel to the nearest town to get better quality Fruit and Vegetables than pay for the low quality that was being offered.
While it took a little time, I started to discover where I could buy good quality produce. By that I do not mean expensive, I mean just good fresh fruit, vegetables, meat and finally fish too. In some cases I still have to travel into Newcastle to get these items, ingredients, but with good planing I avoid paying over the odds to remain well fed.
As I have reached the reached the esteemed age of “Old Git”, and I started teaching myself to cook when I was in my early teens, in the last century, I was genuinely shocked to discover just how poor some peoples cooking and food skills are. This was brought home to me three years ago when I discovered in the local village store, an instant pancake batter mix. Now pancakes are so easy to make that I no longer need to follow a recipe. Further as its just a mixture of Flour, Milk and Egg, I genuinely thought that these would be items that everyone would have in the store cupboard already.
While I wrote about this in my Blog three years ago, then as now, I see no point in ranting about peoples lack of cooking skills, nor is it helpful to accuse people of being lazy as in reality if someone does not know how to cook these supposedly convenience items, I will not call them food, seem like a good alternative. I know that I had to follow a recipe when I first cooked pancakes. But I had developed the skills to try something new. Often people lack the knowledge about food to even know that they can quickly and easily make these meals for themselves.
I started cooking for myself when I became vegetarian back in the late 1970s. This I did as I read a book that was predicting BSE. While it never talked of BSE, they used the example of scrapie in sheep and this fallen stock ending up in the feed for cattle. Now even then I knew that this was unnatural and it made me start to question what I was eating. And this is the real point that I am trying to make, when I was a vegetarian I would constantly be asked what I ate? I often answered by cooking for them and showing that vegetarian food was often far more interesting than they ever imagined.
Therefore, while I suspect that most readers of this will already be confirmed foodies, I also hope that over time I can show that good cooking is not difficult and that good food really matters.
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