are you losing faith in the food industry ?

exlibris

I have 2 sons. As tots they both helped me make food. One showed an aptitude for cooking so eventually I spent more time with him. He later became a chef.

The other is a marvellous cook too, and is not afraid of asking his brother for info on things like jointing a chicken.

In fact I enjoy having both boys in my kitchen when preparing meals. I am still learning from BOTH of them!

pigpen

Our local shops are gradually becoming coffee bars and betting shops and sandwich shops.. the 'Jacksons' has become part of Sainsburys and the 'goodfellows' was bought by jacksons years ago.

There are no 'local' shops at our local shops any more, and probably haven't been for a few years. The greengrocers buy their stock from the fruit dock in a morning.. it comes in on ships and is transported up the road to the local warehouse and from there bought by the shop keepers, It comes mainly from europe but from Africa and America and even Australia some of it so even though these 'local' shops are owned by local people the produce is probably grown further away from home than the produce in Asda.. the tomatoes are grown about 2 miles up the road.

There are no farm shops in the middle of a city so that is out of the equation, the big supermarkets stock locally grown produce (within a 20 mile radius) and the nearest abbertoire is about 45 miles away as far as I am aware.

You don't HAVE to buy the processed junk from the big supermarkets. I think a lot of adult buying is related to what their parents fed them as a child. We were always fed decent home cooked meals and that is what we all cook and eat and feed our families, my youngest sister however was fed processed junk and packet pasta etc and that is what she eats all the time, I honestly don't think she could prepare a proper meal from scratch if her life depended on it!! The really strange thing is my sister who is only 4 years older has severe food allergies and cannot have any artificial preservatives or colouring and her diet is complete different.

The palate seems to get used to certain stuff and that is what you stick with... maybe a bit of the 'better the devil you know' and how many times do we give the children something new and they refuse to eat it because it is 'alien' ( it is about 18 times you have to try a new food before the brain decides it is ok to eat)

Regards the schools teaching cookery, my son is at an all boys school and they have done absolutely NOTHING, not one lesson about cooking, but he knows about food hygiene, balanced diets and can prepare himself a reasonable meal.. trashes the kitchen mind! My daughter who is at a mixed sex school is going to be doing one HALF TERM of cookery in year 8 (ie this term) one double lesson a week (equate to 7 hours), they don't even have enough ovens for everyones stuff to be cooked during the lesson.. she brought home pastry dough last week, and they told her it was 'biscuits'!! So I don't hold out much hope for her. Thankfully she will learn at home!! But her friends don't all.

I don't think it is the schools place to teach life skills, that is what parents are for.. they should be teaching personal hygiene and safety, budgetting, cookery and suchlike. My mother is worse at budgetting than I am.. hence I am teaching HER!!

sproggi

I cannot say that I am losing faith in the food industry as a whole as I believe that it is too broad a term, However, I would not trust any government's reassurances, I watched a friend die from NCJD and know the continuing effect that it has on their family.
Having worked in a food processing factory myself and having friends that have worked at BM, I would never trust the pre-prepared foods that are available.
Having visited a butcher whilst visiting a relative and asking for some lamb's hearts, only to be told that they do not sell them as 'they are more profitable when minced up and added to the sausages', I would not trust all butchers.
I buy some of my meat from an independent butcher whom I trust, even though it means travelling 20 miles away. The rest of my meat I buy at our local farmers market that is held once a month.
I buy my eggs off of my mother who's chickens are treated as living creatures and not just a production line (so pampered in fact that in the recent snow, one old hen who felt the cold, was wrapped in garden fleece and carried around until she warmed up!!).
I grow as much fruit and veg as I can and the rest I buy from the farmers market.
All 4 of my children (ages 18 to 5) have/are been/being taught to cook from scratch.

So I have faith in the food industry where commercialism is not the over-riding factor (not many places then!!!)

Sproggi

ZTD

COOLTRIKERCHICK wrote:

yep you got it.. you find it alot on veg......

its basically saying that it meets our so called british standard that we expect our food to be.....lol...

as i was saying its an optical trick....as we only glimpse at the label... even though we are reading it.... and there is british written on there... only the british is actually registering.....in our minds.. as there is also the british flag colours around it........ very...VERY.. cleaver marketing....for fresh produce.......

the other one to look out for is farm assured.......even an intensive reared animals are from a farm

Well for me it's not clever marketing at all, as I never notice it.

But I am interested in legal "cons" (lies and deceptions within the law) so it suddenly has become interesting - if that makes any sense...

ZTD

Queenie wrote:

Yes, I do agree that school "Food Tech" is an absolute joke but surely, Food Tech should 'compliment' what the children should be learning at home, not take fully responsibility for it?

The only way this can be done is for every child to be quizzed on what does happen at home. You can't complement something unless you know what it is. That would never happen, that would open so many cans of worms...

So the only way that's left, is to teach basic things in a "Everyone needs to know this" kind of way. This doesn't happen. Kids are just taught things which it is possible to teach in a "sit down and watch the blackboard" kind of fashion. The lessons are geared to the delivery mechanism, and not to what is required for them to know.

The thing which would have come in so useful for me is "How to sharpen a knife using a steel."

COOLTRIKERCHICK

ZTD wrote:

Well for me it's not clever marketing at all, as I never notice it.

But I am interested in legal "cons" (lies and deceptions within the law) so it suddenly has become interesting - if that makes any sense...

its clever in way that.......it lures you into a sense of trust in the product you are buying....which they want....

if you read the link that compitionscafe... has kindly done in their earlier post.....if i read it correctly its not an independant body..... and they got to join the association to be aloowed the have the logo...

i feel you got to have your 'martin' head on as i call it.... you got to look at things in a diff way.... just out side the box so to speak.... like you do with loopholes t & c 's etc....

when it comes to what they say..... and the logo's etc....

like if you ask some people when they buy eggs..... barn eggs.... people with assume that they are free-range.... when their not... instead of being in cages.... they are crammed into barns.....even though free moving... they are very cramped conditions....

with free range eggs in the supermarkets.... it was found that about 30% of them were actually from caged birds.....as noe they can tell by ifra red light... shows up the cage marks on the eggs.....

ZTD

COOLTRIKERCHICK wrote:

with free range eggs in the supermarkets.... it was found that about 30% of them were actually from caged birds.....as noe they can tell by ifra red light... shows up the cage marks on the eggs.....

Well it's at that point they should be prosecuted, with a sentence that is a deterrent. But of course, money talks.

I think that's why it is worth buying off people who aren't multi-billion pound businesses, so they are less likely to try anything like that.

Justie

COOLTRIKERCHICK wrote:

its the same.. when you see the logo britsh standard....with the tractor......

you automatically think the item is british.... its not.... its play on words and the eye......

I agree with a lot of what you say Triker but this isn't actually true - the red tractor logo is for British produce only.


http://www.myredtractor.co.uk/site/rtc_faqs.php#rtfoodfrom
"How do I know where Red Tractor food comes from?
By law, most food must be labelled with its country of origin on the label although this is not always easy to find. To make things easier we have included a flag in the Red Tractor logo. If you see the Union flag on the Red Tractor logo, you will know that it is home-grown. That is, the food has been produced and packed in the United Kingdom."


If someone is breaching that then there are ways of complaining and they will have the tractor logo removed. There MAY be a grey area about food grown/reared abroad and processed in the UK but as far as I can find out these shouldn't have the red tractor logo on anyway - although that may be a way round it I have yet to see any proof of it being abused in this way.

You are of course correct when you say that it does not mean that meat is free range etc only that the farms meet the minimum regulations (found here http://www.myredtractor.co.uk/site/rtc_rtstandards.php ). Personally I'd rather have a scheme like the red tractor scheme than the mish-mash that existed before but it is a minimum standard and nothing more.

ZTD

But on the other hand Bernard Matthews Hungarian Turkeys mixed with BM British Turkeys gives BM British Turkeys. And without H5N1 there would have been no proof of that either.

COOLTRIKERCHICK

i personally think that these types... logos etc.... are just to get us into a false sense of security in our food.....

unless you have worked in the food industry.. you know there are a lot of companies that do the opp.. to what it says on the label.....


do i trust the food industry........no i dont.......i have seen things first hand.... plus i have heard things ....from people that have worked in other places of the food industry/chain.....

and its not just processed food either..... its also our basic food.... which we dont think that could be tampared with.........