“If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as the souls who live under tyranny.”
Thomas Jefferson (1778)
Tags: food, government, health, nanny state
“Delia Smith today hit out at the vogue for organic and free-range food, declaring that it was more important that poorer families had access to nutrition.”
Full story: here
Dear Delia,
I read the newspaper reports of your attitude to animal cruelty and air miles with shock! I can’t believe that you think it’s OK to rear animals in a cruel way so that “poorer people” (there must be an awful lot of people poorer than you) can eat properly. What’s proper about eating an animal whose flesh is loaded with antibiotics and hormones? What good does that do anyone?
I’ve been poor – in fact, I’ve been so poor that I couldn’t afford chicken – I used to describe my self as an ‘economic vegetarian’. But even then, I was able to feed myself and my family properly by buying foods in season (not Kenyan peas, for instance) and budgeting well.
But let’s look at this theory of ‘poor people can’t afford free-range chickens’. Yesterday, I bought a free range chicken from Lidl. It’s quite large, weighing in at 1.89kg, and cost £5.67, less than the price of 3 Big Macs (by way of a comparison). Half of that chicken will feed 4-6 as part of a roast dinner, another quarter will make a risotto for 4, the final quarter could be used to make a chicken and vegetable pie, or a curry, in a spaghetti sauce and so on….. to feed another 4 people. That leaves us with the carcase. If you strip off all the bits of meat still left, then boil the carcase and vegetable trimmings and then make soup with the resulting stock, adding back the scraps and some vegetables and perhaps vermicelli or macaroni or better still, lentils and pearl barley, that then gives you a hearty soup which will feed 4-6.
All wholesome food. Let’s add up how much each meal for each person cost. The added costs of potatoes, carrots, cabbage (sticking to seasonal veg, as they’re cheaper), rice, pasta, some frozen peas (cheaper, and definitely more nutritious than peas flown in from Kenya, which have been stored longer), and the herbs and spices, adds another £3-4
Potatoes, King Edwards £1.38 for 2.5kg
Carrots, 62p for 1kg
Cabbage, white, 58p
Frozen Peas, 100g, 18p
Rice, 400g, 19p
Pasta, 200g, 22p
(all prices correct at 15/02/2008
other items from storecupboard or bought. If the additional costs are £4, that’s a total cost of £9.75, for 18-20 meals – less than 55p per meal!
Delia, as a chef, surely your main concern is that people eat good, wholesome, nutritious food – not any old rubbish that fills a belly and could cause health problems. As a chef, you SHOULD be concerned at how your food is treated before you eat it, and as a human you SHOULD be concerned about the effects on the planet that our way of living is generating. Your attitude is both arrogant and patronising, and I’m surprised. How we eat and what we eat is not just politics, it’s about our future.
Finally, farmers in Africa DO need to make a living – and the answer to that IS political. Farmers in Africa need to be able to sell to their local markets, and not have to compete with cheap, mass-produced and over-produced food dumped from the EU. The answer does not lie in flying produce to this country so the privileged classes can shell peas in the middle of winter.
Yours sincerely,
Jean Smith (not a relation).
Tags: delia smith, food, free range, organic