It’s been an interesting month or so; interesting in the Chinese way that is. HL damaged her leg and it became infected, and the antibiotics she was given really made her feel very ill. So between being a driver and organiser down, and going back to being a full time carer, the winter weather and business not being too good because of the time of year and people’s reluctance to spend money at present we have had… interesting times. It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t keep adding to the pile myself. I wanted to get the Plymouth – look at the website - on the road before Easter, which now looks possible, she has an MOT and now I have to get a registration. There is an old joke which comes up in various guises, but basically a man goes into a shop and asks for something. The shop keeper offers him two choices. The man picks one and is then given a second choice of two and so on until finally the shop keeper tells him he is too fussy and he doesn’t have what the man wants. If you phone the DVLA you will find this happening to you, particularly if the options you are given do not fit your question. Mine was ‘can I speak to a human being’, but in the finish (and I would have accepted a civil servant) I found I was losing the will to live, not to mention what my blood pressure was doing.

Speaking of which, every time I switch the television on I am regaled by some tale about the Olympics, a subject in which I have no interest whatsoever, but the fallout from which isn’t doing my blood pressure a lot of good. It is, however, impossible to tune out, particularly when you have to deal with that fallout yourself. We cannot have a market in Weymouth on our normal Sunday in August because we would, apparently, get in the way. What of, I have no idea, because I doubt it’ll be busier than a normal bank holiday, if that, but there seems to be some idea that hordes of people will flock to Weymouth to watch the sailing. On television. Big screens will be set up so that people can watch (and pay for) what is going on, because you won’t see anything from the shore. Seems to me you’d be better off watching it at home where you can sit in comfort and have a beer. If you have a boat you won’t be allowed anywhere near the action. Normal holiday makers will stay away because who wants to get tied up with all these crowds? And then there are the seventy sets of traffic lights between London and Weymouth which will be under the control of the Olympic Great and Good. Blow the locals, we don’t count. If you are wondering where Coe and his cohort got the idea of treating the public with utter contempt from, just remember where the Olympics were four years ago, and how the Chinese treat their people. If Coe and Co really cared about something other than their own self-aggrandisement they’d have made sure that Paris had the games, and then we could all have had a good laugh watching the French spend millions millions they haven’t got.

And the much trumpeted Olympic legacy? Debt, debt and more debt for your grandchildren to enjoy

It’s a funny thing but supermarkets seem able to sell food without giving samples so that people know how good (or in many cases how bland) it is. For some reason people take them on trust. At our markets we put out samples so that people can try before they buy, but of course it doesn’t work like that. People want to try, but not necessarily buy, and some just want to feed. We really do get all sorts. There are the children who have detached themselves from their parents and who will work their way along trying everything. I’m thinking of blending a really hot chilli sample for them, and I’ll include the man who just walked past, put his hand in a dish of samples, grabbed a handful and walked on without even looking at me. He isn’t unusual. One of the olive sellers had this happen one day when a woman walked over, took a handful and walked off. What on earth was she thinking? And why, when someone has tried and made a purchase do they then have to try several more pieces? Do they need confirmation of their good taste? One chap actually had a woman try, buy, and then stand talking to him whilst she worked her way through the rest of his plate of samples. When you add into the mix small children who carry on spearing another piece of cheese (and breathing germs all over your samples) despite being told by their parents to desist, and the people who stand there eating and telling you how good it is with no intention of buying it can, on occasion, be quite difficult to keep smiling.

The blackbirds are chasing each other around the garden, well, the black ones are chasing the brown ones if you know what I mean, there are one or two green leaves appearing and I think I detect some green shoots in an economic sense. Very soon we will have the first batch of sparrows sitting on our fence, and we’ll be able to watch their antics as they try and learn how to get food from the bird feeders. I am almost moved to get on with the new pond so that the fish have more room and the old one can be left for the frogpoles, toadpoles and newtpoles, yes we have them all. We also have a heron who tries to get breakfast, and has sometimes succeeded which can be quite expensive, and a sparrowhawk who pops in for lunch. There are also lots of lambs about although HL and I tend to view them differently. She goes ‘Ahhh, how sweet,’ and I go ‘Mmmm’ and the sweetness is redcurrant jelly. The only problem I see is a lack of rainfall, and now farmers don’t want too much or cattle won’t be able to get onto what little grass there is, and now HL wants water butts installed so that’ll be another little job for me.

I was watching a comedian the other evening and part of his routine concerned customer service. He said, and it seems reasonable to believe him, that when the first customer of the day enters the Apple store in New York the staff all cheer, whereas in any English shop the staff raise a cheer when the last one leaves. I don’t see that as personal, just an expression of being glad to be on their way home, and why not? On balance I prefer the latter. It isn’t that I want the assistants to be rude to me, and I appreciate that the customer is the most important person to enter the shop, but I would like to do it quietly and at my own pace. I particularly do not want, as happened on the occasion when I went into ASDA, to find a meeter and greeter, clearly uncomfortable with the idea of speaking to total strangers. I have to admit that I was unkind to a young lad in Tesco a couple of years ago when I picked up some shrink wrapped broccoli which was marked as originating in Britain CE. Where, I asked him, was Britaince. He knitted his eyebrows and turned to a colleague who clearly didn’t know either. With a knowledge of geography like that I’m surprised they could find their way home.

I find it off-putting when I ask where I can find a particular item and the member of staff stops what they are doing and takes me there. A simple ‘Next aisle but one with the whatever’ will do. We had this not long ago in Waitrose, HL wanted a particular confection which, it turned out, they didn’t have, and that was after a manager had joined in the search. The assistant was a lady of granny age and chatted to us for a few moments. Together with another woman she had been sent on a course to be taught how to speak to customers. It was a day off but she felt it was entirely unnecessary. The whole tone of the lectures was American, and when they were shown a film about fish markets – presumably as some sort of padding so that the consultants could justify whatever they were charging – it was of one somewhere in the US. ‘What about Billingsgate?’ they asked. Blank looks. ‘What is Billingsgate?’ the lecturer asked. And what about Brixham, too much trouble to take a camera down to Devon?

The Americans are, with some reservations, a great nation, but although they speak a form of English they are foreign, they don’t think like us and they don’t act like us. I do want our shop assistants to be polite and helpful, as indeed you will find the producers at our markets, no reason why not, but I do not want to be told, as I was recently to ‘have a nice afternoon’. A simple thank you will suffice; smile optional. It’s bad enough having to put up with an argumentative spell, and that should be spelling, checker on my computer, and to find the date written back to front – I have yet to discover what happened on the 9th November 2001 that engages the Yanks so much. So my message to all the supermarkets, and any other shop keeper who is daft enough to try it is – STOP IT. English English, please.

I had some feed back from my article on salt and the suggestion that half the population didn’t suffer ill affects from consuming too much of that or sugar or indeed suffer ill affects from smoking. My correspondent told me that his brother, like his mother before him, emptied the contents of the cruet over every meal, and he was still going strong in his eighties. Well good for him, I dare say that half the population can tell me similar tales. Curiously, I never heard anything from the other half.

Power supplies are much in the news and recently we went to a meeting in the village hall concerning how you could use alternative energy. It turned out to be a very middle class affair devoted to the use of solar panels to make money and how, if you had £K16-18 you could use heat recovered from the ground or whatever. There was one other guy there who had a similar idea to me, and that was how you could use things like solar to become self- sufficient, off grid. I run the caravan like this, with two batteries and a solar panel we can sit in a field for a week even using the TV, but only having lights on where you are, and not watching the box for the sake of it. But most people see a 13 amp socket and expect it to be ready to go, I’ve even got one producer who will, if given the chance, plug in a lead with several sockets on it and then plug in a couple of ovens. He still can’t work out why the fuse blows. ‘It works at home,’ he says. Well it would, the wiring is different, but every time I explain he just glazes over. It was with some amusement that, whilst chatting to one of the producers at a market, I spied another producer with a new George Foreman grill. He set it up and plugged it in to the socket that I had left for him. He turned it on. Nothing happened. He gazed at it with a perplexed expression. Then he changed the plug over to a socket that I had left for his neighbour. Nothing. He was actually scratching his head when I walked over to him and told him that the generator wasn’t on yet!

How Many for How Much?

I’ve been accused of knocking supermarkets so often that I usually approach the subject with some trepidation. However, if you didn’t watch Sophie Raworth’s report on Panorama, earlier this month then, as a consumer, you really should have. She highlighted some very dubious pricing practices and even admitted that in some cases she couldn’t work out in the store just what price she would pay. The big four supermarkets are basically conning you, they are actually making us all look daft. Why? One of the reasons, shown a number of times is an item costing £1 and a notice saying buy two for £2. You’re not going to fall for that are you? Yes, you are. And Panorama also showed signs for 75p, buy 3 for £4; even worse £1.90 each, 2 for £5.50. Of course that’s an error. Really? Don’t they employ people who can do simple arithmetic? Yes they do, and they employ people who are much better at it than most of us. There were plenty more examples, price drops that aren’t being one.

I think it’s mathematics really; algebra. Now don’t let that put you off, we are only talking about a+b=c; 1+2=3 perhaps, simple eh? Except it isn’t. You have four enormous businesses all dedicated to bringing you the cheapest prices that they can. They’ve all got slogans to con you into believing that they are working for you, and they are all claiming to be cheaper than each other. That’s what they tell you, facts 1 & 2, advertised on your television screen. Unfortunately they don’t add up to 3. Because they are all making very healthy profits, and if they were all working in your favour, and they were all in genuine cutthroat competition you’d expect their profits to be a bit skinny wouldn’t you? But since they’re not, one is tempted wonder why…?

The big four, that’s Tesco, Sainsburys, Asda and Morrisons, account for 68% of the UK grocery market, although there are occasions when you could believe from the breadth of advertising that it was greater, and all are expanding as fast as they can. But they are in an odd position, because if they drive each other out of business, then there would be an investigation into a possible monopoly, and I don’t think they would want that. So although you might think the competition is cutthroat it is anything but, they have no interest in in putting each other out of business.

For the other 32% advertising is harder. Waitrose do some as do M&S and Co-op, Lidl and Aldi don’t seem to, and the independents only do local advertising, as do farmers’ markets, which rely on goodwill from all quarters. But it isn’t enough to dispel the impression that we are more expensive. Customers want to believe that they are getting the best deal, and supermarket advertising is very persuasive, very professional and very expensive, and sometimes not as accurate as it should be. I’ve said before that the butcher in the high street is often cheaper, and the local baker will provide you with bread, not tasteless cotton wool, and our markets will provide better quality, often cheaper, and certainly more nutritious food, eggs laid this morning, and vegetables cut earlier too, cakes that haven’t been on a shelf for ages, meat that has been cared for and is sold by the man who reared the animals.

And those are claims they can’t make. One further claim we can make; transparent pricing.

One lump or two

“Are you having toast with you marmalade?”

HL was looking at my breakfast. Ho hum…

The thing is I like marmalade, but the stuff we made when we ran out of Mrs Pook’s Traditional is a bit lumpy. If you remember we took a tin of MaMade and added some lemon, and the result was… pretty solid, and in order to taste it you have to have quite a lot. Now, if you buy marmalade it won’t be quite that solid, but it will still have quite a lot of pectin in it to make it set. With proper homemade jams and marmalade they are much less solid, and that of course means you get much more fruit. There is absolutely nothing wrong with pectin, it’s colourless tasteless just like water, and it’s the goop that makes jam set. But without it you get more fruit. Commercial jam is made with 30 grams of fruit per 100 grams of jam, and extra jam is 40 grams. Jams made without pectin are often 60 to 80 grams. More fruit equals more flavour. No algebra required.

2012

Father Christmas may have brought us presents, but what will the new year bring? I’d like to think that peace and harmony would be high on the list, but I’ve little doubt that the EU will continue as it has done for a long time, and peace and harmony don’t come into it. Will we leave the club? Will the Greeks leave; more to the point will they be kicked out, they hardly ever obey the club rules. But then the French don’t either. I’m told that there are more Porsche Cayenne’s in Greece than there are registered tax payers earning over 50,000 euros, about what they cost. So I can’t see why the Germans are complaining about supporting them, they’ve had most of the money already, just lend it back. But if we left would we get rid of all the rules and regulations that have been imposed by Brussels and that we hate so much, or will our bureaucrats fight to keep them? Right, if universal suffrage applied to turkeys what do you think you’d have had for Christmas lunch? Don’t expect a lot of change.

Happy new year.

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MARTIN'S MUSE JANUARY 2011

Mayonnaise

I always enjoy watching Jimmy’s Food Factory because Jimmy is so enthusiastic and obviously enjoying himself. I know there are those who reckon that a serious subject should be treated seriously, but I think that whatever you do it ought to be fun. That’s why when anyone asks me how old I think I am I always say seven (unless ladies are involved in which case I’m seventeen) because you’re old enough to know what you are doing, old enough to enjoy it, but young enough to get away with it. So when it comes to watching someone firing potatoes at a tennis racket strung with wire to make chips, or feeding apples into the blade of a lawn mower so that you can make juice, count me in. But I wasn’t so sure about low fat mayonnaise. If you get enough bacteria together they create a biofilm to live in and communicate through. This biofilm – or slime as you would probably know it - also protects them and makes it difficult for medicines to kill them if you have a bacterial infection.

Those of you, oh alright, us, who have things in the fridge that we’ve forgotten about will be familiar with various moulds, and some things we’d rather not name, but you need to go to the cabbage patch to find a good example of a decomposing cabbage complete with biofilm or slime. Now, Jimmy showed us that that particular slime is what they use to thicken low fat mayo. Of course they don’t go around scraping it off decomposing cabbages, I mean, you wouldn’t get enough, no, it’s all grown in hygienic conditions. But it is still slime. So low fat mayo is eggs and slime. But Jimmy missed one ingredient. His mayo was quite yellowy, and you want a nice slightly off white creamy colour, so they add his missing ingredient. Titanium dioxide. Nothing natural about that, and you’ll usually find it in… paint. White paint. So I got to thinking about it and I realised that Michelangelo and his mates used egg based paint, and then you if add paint colouring I reckon that low fat mayo would be better used on your walls. Certainly not on your salad.

Substenance

If I’m out and about I will grab anything to eat that comes to hand. I have even been known to consume the products of fast food places, quite famous ones that I will not identify for fear of a visit from their lawyers. Eaten yes, enjoyed no. Her Loveliness is, however, a little more fussy, but for reasons we need not go into, nowadays requires feeding at fairly regular intervals. We were in one of those small towns situated at the backside of the empire – you know, the ones where some shops don’t open on a Monday, the pubs don’t do food and everyone closes on Wednesday afternoon – and the only thing we could find to eat was something called a ‘sub’. I had always assumed that ‘sub’ was an abbreviation for a submersible boat, but no, it is now a bread roll filled with things which HL suggested even I should not look at. Whatever it was, was accompanied by something called ‘coffee’. Or at least I assume that it was coffee because that is what I had asked for. Having just watched a re-run of Captain Blackadder asking Baldrick to make him a cup of coffee I really do have to wonder.

I have in the past wondered what ‘sub’ meant, when applied to a bread roll and I can now unhappily inform you that it is an abbreviation for ‘substandard’.

Moving in

Several years ago we attended a summer barbie with some friends in town. We commented on how quiet it was.

“But you live in the country, that’s much quieter.”

Indeed, but at harvest time there is a solid wall of noise from American diesel engines as first the crop is cut, then the straw is bailed, then muck spreading, ploughing and seeding. And finally silence. Until the whine of the forager as the maize is cut, and the roar of the tractors rushing it back to the farm.

There seem to be a lot of people with an idyllic view of the countryside, and I ask them a simple question – what’s the difference between a steelworks and the countryside? The answer is that you can’t walk your dog around a steelworks. The countryside is an industrial area in exactly the same way, if more aesthetically pleasing to most. Although a steelworks sometimes smells better.

Size matters

I was a bit slow with supper the other evening and HL and I, somewhat in our cups, were discussing how much influence you could have with people like councillors.

“I’m sure,” I told her, “that someone like you would have some influence, after all you do run a small business.”

And then a light went on in my head. Whilst our own part of the farmers’ markets is quite small, overall it is quite a big business; if you add everyone together we are talking some millions of turnover with perhaps 150 employees, with us representing it, and I suggested that this would give quite a lot of clout.

Well, after all her operations she is now feeling much better, so watch this space.

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MARTIN'S MUSE FEBRUARY 2011

And another thing.

Too few disabled spaces, and why do the mother and toddler ones have to be right outside the door? Yes, you’re right, I’m dissatisfied with yet another supermarket – this one in Newton Abbot – and this time the car park, but this is a common complaint. HL can rarely get a disabled space and why on earth do the mother and child spaces need to be that close to the door? Have they lost the use of their legs? It may seem cynical but I would suggest that it might be because disabled people don’t buy as much as mums with children, but they do appear to have more clout in Brussels. However, I bravely supported her on the long trek to the entrance for essential supplies. Well, coffee and a Panini in Costa’s anyway. Not often a supermarket heeds my advice – as if – but I did write to Tesco and say that if they wanted a better class of customer, that is people who appreciate quality, then having a drinks machine in their café wasn’t the right way to go. So now we have Costa Coffee. Pity about the rest of it though.

We didn’t buy anything at the supermarket in Totnes because although they would refund your parking fee of £2 if you spent a tenner, the meter consumed about £2.50 and still only registered £1.90 when I thought, what a bloody cheek, and instructed HL to leave. I suppose this was partly coloured by the fact that at one of our market sites we have had problems with this particular company taking over a car park that didn’t belong to them and issuing ‘notifications of possible fines’, to the point where HL told the manager that if we had any further problem she would call the police.

We were, as you will have guessed, on holiday in South Devon, and having left the supermarket in Totnes we parked in the town centre for 40p and found an excellent selection of small shops where we stocked up on fruit and veg, and some bakery items including a lunchtime sandwich that was not only fresh, but had so much filling that it was almost embarrassing. And I didn’t have to read a long list of ingredients because it was sold to me by the person who made it. On the Thursday there was an excellent market with a number of food stalls that could be classed as ‘farmers’ market’ and some bric à brac too. We bought some local veg., and some bread, an excellent fruit loaf. The baker hails from Dunkeswell if you ever see them.

A lot of South Devon is given over to the ‘Pony Brigade’, and thus looks very untidy, the land being cluttered with things for them to jump over and other stuff. I guess we should think ourselves lucky that we are surrounded by hunters who are much more tidy. It is, however, a sad reflection on agriculture that we have so few farm animals, Old MacDonald has packed in his attempt to feed the nation and instead is giving a home to llamas and other strange foreign animals. What next? Will the bare patches on your lawn be caused by bears? Will we have yaks yakking away to each other? Or wolves wolfing down their food?

In his cups again

Her Loveliness complains every time she comes across a recipe with measurements in cups. Every time I point out to her that not everyone has a set of scales, but everyone has a cup or something that can measure volume, and that cooking is a very inexact science at best. One of the things I do is make ‘Danish’ pastries. I use sheets of frozen puff pastry on which I spread almond cream, and there’s the problem. The only recipe I can find is measured in cups, which isn’t too bad until you come to half a cup plus one tablespoon of unsalted butter. How big, I wondered, is a cup because then I could translate the measurements into weights. It depends on where you are. Australia, Canada and South Africa use metric cups, The US has customary cups and legal cups, the British of course use imperial cups, and the Japanese use… Japanese cups. A metric cup of sugar weighs 200g, imperial 230g and US customary cupful is 190g. By the time I had discovered all this I had pretty well run out of the will to live and just did a rough ‘that looks about right’. And it was.

Back to normal

Would it be me if I didn’t tell you a snippet about one of our supermarkets. The biggest this time. They sell local free range eggs, and I can assure you that they are local and free range. They are collected all week and on Monday morning a lorry arrives to collect them. It then takes them the a staging point in Berkshire where they are transferred to a bigger lorry and taken to Lincolnshire where they are graded and packed into retail boxes. Then they are reloaded onto another lorry and driven to the distribution depot near Southampton. Another lorry takes them to your local store. So as well as being free range they are also pretty free ranging.

So that’s another good reason for coming to a farmers’ market where, if I’m cooking I’ll prove just how fresh the eggs are. Simply crack one into a pan and the white will run all over the place because it hasn’t had time to set fully – it won’t happen with a supermarket egg. One last thing; an old gent I knew always kept his eggs in the fridge. Every morning he would turn them to make sure the yolk stayed in the middle. There’s dedication for you.

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JULY 2011

Marmalade

I’ve been eating homemade marmalade for years, but due to a slight miscalculation – that is HL sold it all – we’ve run out. With no Seville oranges to make more what should I do? I started with the jar of three fruit that my friend brought back from his holiday for me, made in a midlands factory and dressed up to look like he sort of thing that your local WI ladies would make, until you looked at the list of ingredients. It was very sweet. So next time I was passing a supermarket I popped in. Not, it has to be said, a fabulous choice but they did have Frank Cooper’s and Wilkins. The first was made with only 20g of fruit per 100g of product, but the second was made with 40g and only contained sugar and oranges. So that was what I bought. It was very sweet.

“Father,” I said, “always made his own from tinned sevilles sold as Ma Made, I wonder if they are still available.”

A quick search using the World Famous Search Engine found them in no time, price and availability. The next supermarket visit was Waitrose where the display of marmalade is mind boggling. After long enough for the staff to be giving you odd looks we finally settled on a can of Ma Made. Having looked at the ingredients, only 75% of the content is Seville oranges, and having done some calculations we decided that adding a lemon – normally to increase the pectin content which makes it set – and cutting back on the recommended quantity of sugar should produce something that would suit us. And it did, bitter orange flavour, not too sweet, but, since the tin contained additional pectin, a very firm set.

The other thing is that, if you discount the cost of a jar, and you can use anything for yourself, jam jars, coffee jars or mayo ones, it worked out at 60p per pot and took very little time to make. If you bought sevilles in January it would cost you even less. I can’t tell you that everything you cook for yourself will be that much cheaper than what you buy ready made, but what I can tell you is that you can adjust the flavours to suit your own taste and you’ll know exactly what is in it. And I guarantee it’ll be much better quality.

Marketing

It’s something that small producers are not very good at, and big supermarkets are very good at. So what is it? At its most basic it is simply having the right product in the right place at the right price. But that isn’t the least bit simple. Many years ago I knew a lady who was a buyer for a large department store. This enabled her to buy things from the store at cost price. I was visiting her one day and on her coffee table was a glass vase. It wasn’t particularly large but it was very elegant, being elliptical in plan and tulip shaped in side view. I remarked on it and she asked me if I could guess the cost. I had no idea so she told me, the cost price was seven shillings and six pence (37.5p) – I did say it was a long time ago! So it’s probably best to multiply these figures by ten. My task was then to work out the retail price. Fifteen shillings (75p) I guessed. No, she replied, four pounds fifteen shillings. The reasoning was simple. The ‘ordinary’ person who could afford fifteen shillings wouldn’t want it, but the ‘better class’ person who would appreciate it would consider that to be too cheap, so they wouldn’t buy it. One thing marketing is not, is politically correct, to make money you must not call a spade a spade. But you need to know exactly what one is.

In the beginning, of farmers’ markets that is, I said we should look at what the supermarkets did, because that would give us some ideas as to what the public wanted. But everyone carried on doing what they had always done, and of course they were largely right, because most of the supermarket customers are not going to buy from us. The supermarkets on the other hand, realised that our sales would look better through their tills, there was a market sector that wanted local food. But it can be quite difficult to get a good supply of local food so in the main they use kidology, words that make you think it’s local. Morrisons have a sign over their fruit and veg saying ‘Market Street’, and Tesco sell a ‘Dorset’ pie, (although there is no specific regional pie of this name). Well, Morrisons is a market of a kind and an aisle could loosely be called a street, and Tesco’s pie is made in Dorset. In a big factory.

“It’s brilliant,” Bridport Pie’s owner, Martin Aldridge told me. “The packaging is spot on.”

There is, however, just one small snag. If you want to contact the manufacturer, whether to enthuse or complain, you pop ‘dorset pies’ into the famous web search engine and you get… Bridport Pies, whose website is www.dorset-pies.co.uk

Needless to say Martin isn’t too happy since his products really are handmade. And finest quality, although Bridport isn’t ‘more’ Dorset than Poole.

These ‘weasel words’ cannot tell a lie or Trading standards would be on them, but ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’?

See how many you can spot.

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AUGUST 2011

Hard Times

Yes, hard times for everyone, it must be so because the government and the Bank of England keep telling us. The curious thing is that up until a couple of months ago when Mervin King told us we were worse off we didn’t seem to think so. The other odd thing is that the metric leader of the other lot (Milliband – do keep up) seems to think it’s all the present governments’ fault, because his lot haven’t been in power for ages. Must be all of eighteen months.

But is it really that bad? Probably. But when you are tightening your belts remember that quality of food is more important than quantity and that a small amount of lean is better than a large amount of fat.

Feedback

I’ve had some feedback recently from people saying that they think I knock supermarkets too much because they do a good job of keeping us supplied with the foodstuffs we need. Well that’s true, because they’ve managed to get rid of independents by use of their greater buying power. Unfortunately they’ve also made a fetish of price. Yes, I can hear the howls of outrage; why should we pay more? But think about it, they’re always telling you that one is cheaper than the other, but as I’ve said before they don’t tell you that Jim’s Butchery in the High Street is cheaper than they are, and unfortunately the economies of scale apply to advertising, and Jim can’t afford to do that. And along with scale comes dumbing down of flavour. The thing is that for economies of scale you need to shift as much as possible that’s all the same. Think Volkswagen, Audi, Skoda, all basically the same, just different labels; scale. And you want them all to appeal to as many people as possible, so the basic thing is… nice, but unexciting. You can add a bit of excitement at extra cost, but still basically the same. The supermarkets don’t even bother, you’re all the same size. Bland. Don’t believe me?

Take cheese, ‘cause I know a bit about that. If you have the basic supermarket cheese it doesn’t have a lot of flavour, because you want as many people as possible to buy it. If it had a lot of flavour some people wouldn’t buy it, and the people who want flavour just put up with it and moan. Like me. Mature cheeses are more expensive too. I’ve tried the expensive full flavoured supermarket cheese and… bland. What happened to the cheese that we had when I was a kid, don’t they make it any more?

A couple of weeks ago HL and I went to the farm that has been making our Farmhouse Cheddar to see what else they did. We were taken into the store where we sampled various cheeses, the cheesemaker taking a core from each. This was quite an education. First we sampled a two year old, which we eventually settled on, but we tried them up to four years old. That’s mature. As the cheese gets older it develops an oniony flavour and we decided to avoid that. The other thing we discovered when we got back with a quarter of a truckle, was that it isn’t easy to cut it neatly, particularly in smaller pieces, but the public reaction has to be seen to be believed, and we have had to collect the other three quarters, and now we’ll need to go back to select another cheese. Hot cakes have nothing on this stuff and you can only get it at… you know where.

Bournvita

If you are a certain age you will remember this, a chocolate drink that was claimed to help you sleep. I remember it because when I was a kid there was always a tin in the larder, and as a very small child my parents sent for the promotional mugs that Cadbury sold if you sent them so many labels. If you ever see one they were cream plastic with a low relief sleeping face and had a blue plastic lid that came down the side with a red ball on the end, just like a night cap. When I was older I used to make sandwiches of thick slices of bread spread with butter and golden syrup and a thick layer of Bournvita sprinkled on; it makes me queasy to think of it.

One of my neighbours remembers it well too, and felt that he’d like to try it again. His wife enquired of several supermarkets whether they stocked it with negative results. He’s always a help to me, taking in parcels and the like when I’m out so I decided by way of a favour to check on the internet, and sure enough not one supermarket stocks it. Ovaltine and Horlicks, and oodles of quite disgusting concoctions, but no Bournvita. So, using the world famous search engine I discovered that it is not only still made, but easily available, either from shops that sell African food stuffs, or Indian. The African one was cheapest so I ordered a one pound tin and in a couple of days it duly arrived. There was nothing remarkable about the tin except for one thing; there was a picture of a well nourished and attractive mum and two children on it. Clearly of African origin. And I wondered if I had purchased it from the Indian shop whether it would have been an Indian family on the label. My neighbour is a retired farm hand who has lived all his life in Dorset so his suggestion was not for publication, other than that he wishes it were available in the local supermarkets.

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SEPTEMBER 2011

The Demon Drink

It appears they’ve done it again. My mate went to the doctor’s a while back and whilst he was there he had his blood pressure taken. It was 200 over something I can’t remember, but those of us of a certain age will appreciate that this is quite high. Well, very high actually, particularly for a man who doesn’t suffer from high blood pressure. Normally. So what was it that caused the problem? He was asked to fill out questionnaire to ‘assist’ in advising him on a healthy life style, and one question was about how much he drank. Alcohol that is. He was so incensed at this that his blood pressure shot up. What damned business is it of theirs how much I drink he asked me later. Over a drink. None at all I agreed with him, but it’s all based on this 28 units per week for men and 21 for women, and a unit is a very ungenerous glass of wine, not the kind you get in our house. Now it seems the committee of doctors who arrived at this figure have broken ranks with one of them admitting that the figures were just plucked out of the air with no scientific justification whatsoever. The official figures for Italians allow for an extra bottle of wine per week, whereas the Swedes can only take half the amount of we Brits, which would seem to give credence to the ‘plucked out of the air’ comment.

We get a lot of this sort of thing, eggs used to be bad for you and now they are good, butter likewise, better, we were told, though not in so many words, to eat hydrogenated fats, margarines – funny how that word disappeared in favour of ‘spreads’. But whether good for you or bad really depends on the individuals metabolism, some people seem able to eat fatty foods and stay slim, whereas others only have to look at a cream cake to put on a couple of pounds, and alcohol is the same, most of us know when we’ve had enough without having to consult the label that now graces the back of my bottle telling me I should drink responsibly. Well, I try not to dribble.

Diet for longer life

There was a scientific paper published in 1939 which suggested that as you got older you stopped aging, not an auspicious year for a paper on that sort of subject when a lot of people were about to get not very much older. This suggestion does seem contrary to logic but has now been confirmed. The problem is that you don’t stop aging until you are very old, I mean ninety or so, which means that you will have more time to spend complaining about the youth of today and all those other little irritations that the elderly seem prone to rather than at an age where you could really use the extra time. They wondered if diet had anything to do with the effect and some of the research has been based on the few people who have not been exposed to a diet high in dairy and grains, basically Amazon Indians, and in these people the break happens earlier, suggesting that a hunter gatherer diet is better for you. Anyone for a few more berries whilst Fred is out running after that rabbit?

For those of you in your twenties or thirties who decide on this option, it doesn’t kick in until you have finished breeding. One or two other problems might occur; from a purely mechanical point of view your joints will probably wear out, but on the bright side I expect there’ll be some hope on the Alzheimers front.

Globalisation

The BBC’s Countryfile recently ran an item on whether we could feed ourselves, a subject I have covered on a number of occasions. As organisers of farmers’ markets we are obviously in favour of local where possible, and where sensible. One of the things pointed out was that should we produce all our own food, a bad harvest and we’d be in the do dos. All very well you may say, but we would just import until next year. But if other countries no longer export to us they won’t have the surplus, and if shipping companies don’t usually bring us grain then they won’t have the ships to do it with. We started down this slippery slope before the Romans got here, because then we exported grain, and Columbus made it worse, when he discovered America, although coming from Bristol I’d claim it was Cabot and his merry men who did the deed. Whoever, we started shipping stuff back and forth, and taking plants from their natural habitats and growing them for our advantage. Potatoes for instance, how could you have an Irish stew or a Lancashire Hot Pot without them? And the chillies that we all associate with a Hot Madras (yes, I know, it’s Chennai nowadays) are really native to central America. And if we didn’t ship stuff around we wouldn’t have the varied and interesting diet that we have today.

A level playing field

I told you a couple of months ago about Bridport Gourmet Pies and the Tesco ‘Dorset’ pie. Martin Aldridge the proprietor was unhappy that anyone who put ‘dorset pies’ into the world famous search engine (I put it that way because they do not want their name to become a generic noun like Hoover, because we all hoover don’t we? Lots of us with Dysons.) because they arrived at Bridport Gourmet Pies website to make whatever comment they wanted. Martin couldn’t help them because he didn’t make the Tesco pies. There is good news however. Bridport Pies wrote to Tesco pointing out the problems that they were causing and after a few weeks they received a reply telling them that the pies had now been withdrawn from sale. Well done Tesco, a small step for a giant multinational corporation, a giant leap for a small local company.

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OCTOBER 2011

100, not out

Nowadays quite a few people reach the grand age of one hundred but I suspect that few family businesses do. The usual pattern is that someone starts a business, does well and the children, having had the benefit of a better education, end up running the business into the ground. I’ve seen this happen a number of times over the years and I’m sure you can think of examples too. It’s not always like that of course, and we have two businesses on our markets that have been going for several generations. One is a farm and transport business that will very quietly reach its century in a couple of years, without fuss or fanfare, and the other is Oxfords Bakery. We recently attended their hundredth birthday party, and were treated to a tour of the bakery – it always amazes me how small a bakery is – and got to chat to Roger Oxford. We see Roger quite often, but flying in and out of markets to deliver the bread, so it was good to get some background on the business. Roger has now handed the business on to his son Steve, who, whilst introducing some new ideas has kept to the basic principle of producing high quality craftsman baked bread. ‘I don’t want to be the biggest,’ he told me, ‘just the best.’

Oxfords, whose bakery is at Alweston just north of Sturminster Newton, have a shop in Sherborne and Steve has opened three more, one at the bakery itself, and in Blandford and Canford Cliffs, and now brings his bread to farmers’ markets. This is a considerable change and allows him to reach a much wider public. So there’s another good reason to pop down to Weymouth for the farmers’ market.

Yeucch

I read that within a year they will be able to produce sausages and burgers which are all meat but which have never encountered a living animal. The meat, if that is what you would call it, is grown ‘in vitro’ and is composed entirely of muscle cells which have to be stretched to simulate the exercise they would naturally get if they were part of an animal. No fat, no gristle. There are problems. Meat contains blood and myoglobin which are the red colouring and they are now looking for ways to build these in. Even the vegetarians amongst us, who will be targeted by the marketing men because this is completely ethical ‘meat’ which doesn’t involve killing animals (they’ll eventually discover that many vegetarians just don’t like meat) will know that meat is essentially red. And this isn’t.

And then there is the yuecch factor. Venison producers hate it when I say, ‘Ah, Bambi. Seen the film, eat the star,’ and references to ‘Babe’ in the pork sausages aren’t welcome either, and inaccurate too, all forty Babes ended up on the film crew’s barbeque. But that’s it, with the thought of how it is made, how many people will want to eat man made meat?

The curious thing is that it will undoubtedly be better than what the supermarkets sell as sausages and burgers. If you saw the appalling conditions on mass produced pig farms, saw mechanically recovered meat and the buckets of chemicals, flavour enhancers and preservatives that go into these products then you certainly wouldn’t eat them. You might even be willing to try man made meat – even the people perfecting it haven’t done that yet – but will you overcome that yeucch factor?

What on Earth?

Just what are we talking about:

‘Supple and very easy drinking, rich spiced berried fruit Full bodied and juicy with a hint of smoke.’

‘Tremendous depth and excitement, jammy, ripe blackberry, bramble and raspberry jostle for attention.’

‘Aromas of plum, cherry and chocolate complement liquorice and spicy oak flavours.’

‘Rich ripe plum and dark berry flavours with savoury undertones and subtle oak.’

‘Rich plum and berry and subtle black pepper.’

Okay, not too difficult, I’ll bet everyone said they were the descriptions from the backs of bottles of wine. And like me I expect you really thought that wine would taste of grapes, because it contains nothing but grapes, that’s why the French don’t want the ingredients listed, isn’t it? Would that life was so straight forward; red wine made from red grapes and white wine from white grapes, but no, even that isn’t always the case, because some whites are made from red grapes, and the bottles rarely contain nothing but the product of the grape vine. I daresay that nowadays French paysan do not have their annual foot wash by treading grapes, and the indigo dye from their d’Nime overalls doesn’t wash off into the must, along with anything else with which they have become encrusted in the previous twelve months, but your supermarket bottle of wine will contain sulphites and inhibitors to prevent spoilage on the shelf. Why? At the supermarkets’ insistence. As we all know, wine cellars are dark and cool, the ideal places to keep wine in perfect condition, whereas supermarket shelves are bright, light and warm, just like summer and the ideal places for long chain proteins to grow in the wine and spoil it.

The other interesting thing is the cost. The tax on a bottle of wine is, in round figures, £2.40. Then there is the cost of production, transport and profit for the retailer and quite possibly an importer too. Plus VAT. So how come you can buy a bottle for three quid?

The suggestion made to me is that someone isn’t paying all the duty, because the paper trail is so obfuscated that no one can follow it, so supermarkets may be paying millions in tax, but perhaps it should be tens of millions.

And then there was the bottle that said ‘…finishing with a hint of old leather.” I looked at my old shoes; I think I’ll pass on that one.

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NOVEMBER 2011

Sweeties Equals Fatties

Hands up all the old soldiers who remember ‘compo rations’, or ‘Rations Composite’ as they were officially known. Right, that’ll be all of you. There were seven different menus, and almost everything came in a tin including sweets, cigarettes and matches. But not the tooth crunching hard tack biscuits. The meals were varied but no one ever worked out the precise ingredients of ‘Meat with Vegetables’. One of the stranger tins was the ‘Bread with Raisins’ which was in addition to the set meals. To the uninitiated, these smooth sided tins without any labels or markings seem the pinnacle of military confusion, but the unusual height and the "thud" the tin would make when shaken were the give-away. It was a popular item, the "bread" (more of a cake) being equally well-liked with slices of tinned ham, cheese spread or as a sandwich with baked beans. Although tin openers were provided a soldier learnt to open a tin with almost anything that came to hand. Believe it or not these are reproduced today for those who wish to re-enact war situations – aka nutters.

The Yanks had something similar called ‘K rations’, the main difference between the two being that K rations were for emergency use whereas compo rations were what the troops were fed on. K rations were designed by a man called Ancel Keys, hence the ‘K’, of whom few will have heard, but whose influence on our present lives and diets is profound.

Keys studied nutrition and epidemiology and through something called the Seven Countries Study determined that the saturated fats found in meat were linked to cardio vascular disease. From this it seemed that margarines were healthier because they contained unsaturated vegetable fats, which was fine until we discovered that hydrogenated fats were just as bad for us. If not worse. Like so many doctors and scientists Keys was not above bending his results to fit in with his theories (there is a paper on statins that has such flawed methodology that it almost beyond belief that it has been so influential), ignoring the fact that meat contains the same unsaturated fats as vegetables. Another of Keys’ inventions, based on his research, is the ‘Mediterranean’ diet. He designed this together with his wife Margaret based upon the vegetable and olive oil diet found in southern Italy and Greece, that is promoted in advertising to this day. But the Greeks and southern Italians probably live longer because they are not noted for working.

Keys work led to the proliferation of low fat high sugar content foods, which is where I started on all this. You’ll recall that the tobacco industry fought tooth and nail for years using bent scientific evidence and suppressing anything which showed that their product was bad for you, well, the sugar industry is little better. I was well aware that the way in which calories, as in so many calories in this portion of whatever, were calculated in a rather dubious manner. In fact it is just a measurement of the amount of heat given off by the sample, not the effect it might have on your body. I was alerted to the fact that sugar isn’t like that by a lecture by Professor Robert Lustig of UCSF on You Tube. Rather simplified, you put on more weight from eating sugar than the calorific value would indicate, and this applies to foods containing sugar. So that is why processed foods containing sugar are bad for you, they don’t do what they say on the can. It gets worse. Sugar is addictive, so the food industry starts you off as soon as your mum stops feeding you, and you are fed ‘formula’. Yeah, lots of sugar, and remember, those companies make the food that you’ll eat from then on. Lots of lovely processed foods…

There is lots more on this subject on the jolly old interweb, so if you like not sleeping too well go and see, although if you try reading some of the scientific papers you’ll probably nod off despite the content.

What happened to Ancel Keys? He lived to be just 100, 1904 -2004. So perhaps he had something with his diet. Or perhaps it’s genetic, who knows?

Oh, not wine again.

Yes, my mate came up with what he reckons is the last word in wine description ‘…overtones of suave toast’. Oh, come on what on earth does that mean? We sat and discussed it. Over coffee. Suave toast; could it be brown bread, wholemeal? No, that would be rustic, hardly suave. But just what does suave mean? To me it conjures a picture of the sophisticated man about town, and that’s about what it is. My dictionary gives smooth and bland. Right, so it’s white cotton wool bread toasted. But that’s hardly an invitation to imbibe is it? And then his wife bowled a Yorker; could the toast refer to a toast, she asked, as in ‘Gentlemen, The Queen’. Which led in turn to the idea that the wine might be good at barbies, where roasting might be described as toasting, or more likely burning, and you could be toasting the toasting or… I give up, any ideas as to what it means?

And so

Things are very slow. The Bank of England is determined that we should all feel poor, because it keeps telling us so, I don’t know about you but I wasn’t too worried about how we’d get through the winter until someone in authority said we’d all have a job to pay the heating bills, and now I’ve got to worry about that. Her Loveliness started making caramellised shallots which involve heating vinegar with spices, Lots of them and chilli too. I hastily constructed a clean area in the shed so that most of the heating and cooking can take place out of the house, I mean, the first batch killed off her pelargoniums so what it does to my lungs I dread to think. I wouldn’t mind but I hate the things with a passion, but everyone else seems to love them. So for once I’m in a minority of just one.

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DECEMBER 2011

Be Careful What You Wish For

There are many stories and not a few jokes about encounters with the ‘Little People’, Leprechauns, Genies, those sort of things, and the basis is always that when you make a wish you should think about it and word it very carefully, including the punctuation. But I couldn’t possibly tell that joke here. Taxation seems to be the greatest wish of politicians, tax it and we’ll get what we want. Well, they never have yet. In 1920 the Ford Model T was sweeping the British car industry under the carpet so parliament introduced a tax to defeat it. And it did… but we ended up with tiny engined cars that our colonies didn’t want to buy, so they bought American – lots of Model T’s, but built in the US, not England, and the effects were still felt into the 1960s. Smoking is highly taxed, has it stopped people smoking? Not many; what it has done is put loads of money into the bootlegger’s pockets – no tax collected on the tobacco, and none on the profits made. A double whammy. Much the same applies to booze, loads of tax which encourages criminal gangs to counterfeit, and do they bother about what goes in the bottle? No they don’t, and much of it is poisonous, methyl or wood alcohol. Banning things doesn’t help either, if there is a demand then someone will supply, at a price. Most of these things affect low income people more than the MPs who pass the laws or the do-gooders who want them. The latest example to hand comes from Demark where they have an obesity epidemic. They are nowhere near as obese as us, but it is on the increase. The remedy is, it seems, to tax anything that can make you fat; fats, oils, sugars and that sort of thing. What the effect will be I can’t say, because it is quite a recent thing, and the level of taxation isn’t very high, but if I were being cynical – as if - I would say that the effect would be minimal. But it is a good cover for raising more tax revenue. The pips may squeak but it is difficult for people to complain if it is supposed to be doing them good.

Every Little Helps

We managed to get a few days away at the end of October and HL wanted to go to Westonbirt Arboretum to see the autumn colours, so we hitched the shed (actually it’s a palatial home from home) to the back of the Beast and off we went. We found a nice little site which turned out to be next to the churchyard. The first night was the 31^st, and I was quite disappointed that nothing happened, no witches, no zombies, and fortunately no children demanding sweets with menaces, a practice of which I thoroughly disapprove. If I gave your children sweets during the rest of the year you’d probably scream ‘paedophile’, so why do you send them out begging in the dark?

Unfortunately we forgot something, we usually do, but on this occasion it was something important – coffee. So we had to find a supermarket. The local one was Tesco complete with a sign saying something about saving you money every day. Now normally we would use Waitrose, who claim, with some justification, that if you compare like with like then they are the same price as Tesco. But once you stray off ‘like for like’ what happens? Well, we always drink ‘Monsooned Malabar’, we don’t drink a lot so the cost isn’t unreasonable. We found something similar in Tesco, from a very small selection and were staggered to find that it was 80p dearer for a pack than our normal one and in our opinion it wasn’t as good either. I’m afraid this is pretty much the par for all the supermarkets, a tin of beans is the same price, but once you get to the more unusual the price rockets. Except, curiously, at Waitrose. They are the cheapest for sugar, and when we wanted some shelled pecan nuts, I couldn’t find wholesale prices cheaper and the same applied to dried apricots, and this seems to apply across the board, if it is something other than your everyday shopping the price is at least reasonable and usually very good.

Now, I don’t want you all to go traipsing off to Waitrose, dear me no, I want the store left clear or me without you lot cluttering it up, but what I do think is that Tesco et al should be a little more honest, competitive pricing on your everyday items yes, but less gouging on the things you don’t buy very often.

British

I was interested to watch a food programme about beef, but Aberdeen Angus isn’t as the chef said, on the endangered list, come to any of our farmers’ markets and you’ll find it there. What was good to hear was confirmation of what I have been saying for a long time that grass fed Angus, properly hung is better than anything you will find in your supermarket. For reasons of economy they use a bigger animal like a Charolais, or a Belgian Blue, and generally grain fed. The big difference is that these continental beasts weren’t bred for eating, they were for pulling ploughs and carts. It’s a bit like driving a lorry instead of your Honda; it can carry more and it’s bigger, but it’s a lot tougher too and nowhere near as smooth.

The second half of the programme was devoted to cockles and mussels, and and there was little doubt that the presenter was keen on them. I do eat mussels on occasion, but if you think for one moment that a cockle will pass my lips… British or not.

The other thing I am watching is ‘The Food Hospital’, and that is bringing up some very interesting things. A lot of food for thought.

If I don’t see you before Christmas remember, be careful what you wish for! Have a good one.

MARTIN'S MUSE

MARTIN'S MUSE JANUARY 2011

Mayonnaise

Substenance

I have in the past wondered what ‘sub’ meant, when applied to a bread roll and I can now unhappily inform you that it is an abbreviation for ‘substandard’.

Moving in

Size matters

In his cups again

Back to normal

Marmalade

Marketing

Hard Times

Feedback

Bournvita

Top of page

None of my business

And so to finish

Smoking

Salt

Local

And…

Smile

Mum, mum

She’s back

Will it affect the food on your table?

Some new producers

And some advice

Customers

Salt

Spring

Where did it come from?

Of pianos and other things

Markets

History

Having your cake

Food value

Munchies and Junkies

And talking of…

Price and quality

MARTIN'S MUSE NOVEMBER 2010

Lab Rats

Omega 6

Xenophobia

Food

2009

Pigs

And talking of…

Martin Pook

I’m not happy

Allergies

Greenwash

Calorie counting

MARTIN'S MUSE OCTOBER 2009

Update

And another

Greenery

Food

HASSOP

Because we can

Just to end up with

Misleading

GM

And finally