The Desperate Need For Undermining Big Foodie.

Chefs and all those who show their food skill in the media would do well to have new mores about what they recommend.
It used to be said of Normandy and Brittany too but to a lesser extent how can food fail there when their is so much fabulous dairy and great fish from the sea in the hands of French flair.
Well of course it never did fail being just great.
But like those counties of France we across the western world have fabulous food sources at hand and we fail.
Well we need to rethink food so that it precludes what is unhealthy both in substance and in preparation and yet allows itself to be yearned for.
But here lies the problem; the public in general cannot disentangle itself from what it has known in the past and what the eternal drumming into our consciousness what advertising is letting Big Foodie impress us with.
We need to be able to justly rubbish food companies whose produce is unhealthy with impunity. An American company is selling biscuits for breakfast under a label suggesting a real healthy food when indeed they are convenience pap -  the rub is the price which is breathtaking - but a bit like a popular cereal maker.
The supermarkets generate interest in the product by half price offerings - still at painful prices and then put the price back and wait for those who have taken the bait.
Till a construct or algorithm is generated which will keep exposure of Big Foodie from taking it opponents to court we need thousands of volunteers who will go into super markets and where rubbish food are on sale surreptitiously stick on the shelf edge an appropriate label warning would be buyers.
Any ideas how to get this idea into a wide spread practice would be welcome. Perhaps the popularising of a blog listing those products could be a start!

Scrumptious Turkanga Patties

Have the Australians crossed turkeys with kangaroos to produce a new meat for the market? No, I’m afraid not - there would be a lot of people jumping up and down and be hopping mad if that was the case.

The answer is no. But in Australia kangaroo meat in a variety of cuts is fairly easily available in supermarkets as is turkey.

Using mince from both animals mixed to make patties, rissoles or meat loaf produces really tasty and healthy item which is liked by kids and adults alike.

Turkanga Meat Patties.

Essential ingredients-

  Equal amounts of kangaroo and turkey mince - a big handful or around 350 grams each.

  An egg

  A big breakfast cup full of finely cut onions - its a good idea to sweat these a little seperately - just to soften them so they conform to the shape you make the mix

  A big breakfast cup full of finely grated sweet potato

  Half a big breakfast cup of cooked brown rice   

  A heaped dessert spoon  of psyllium or an another egg

  Pepper and salt to taste.

Optional

  Some finely chopped parsley

  Some dried herbs of your choice

  Some chillie fresh or dried - take it easy to start with especially if you want kids to eat them!

Mix thoroughly in a good sized bowl making sure the mince is well broken apart and evenly spread. Leaving it for a while at room temperature lets the flavour permeate and develope.

At this stage you can pop the mix in the fridge ready for later or go ahead and make the patties.

It’s a nice idea to coat them just before you cook them and I use an oatmeal and rice flour in equal portions in a clear plastic bag. Rolled oats works a treat too.

Using a biggish spoon as a measure, depending on the size you want your patties, take a dollop of the mix, make into a rough ball and drop it into the bag with the rice flour and oatmeal coating and jiggle this about till it is coated- this makes coating so easy and so much less messy ..

Remove and place aside - repeat  this till you have a suitable number ready to cook.

The cooking! Pop a little butter and/or rice bran oil in an open pan over which you can place a lid.

Let it heat through on a really low jet - if you use butter, it is ready when it  has stopped making bubbles.

Place the coated balls gently in the pan and press down to make a flattish pattie and allow a little space around each.

Keeping a lid on cook on a flicker of heat for 20 minute or so then turn them over for another 15 minutes with lid on. If a little browning is desired leave the lid off for five or ten minutes turning once for each side.

Keeping the heat down and the lid on means thorough cooking of the meat but also little tendency to break up or to express liquid from themselves meaning they are really moist and tender.

Cooking on a flicker of heat this way the meat component contracts very little and thus does not express all the nice juices of the meat and keeps the patties from swimming in gravy.

Serve on really warm plate with turmeric infused brown rice and warmed raw greens - chopped Chinese broccoli and/or celery give a nice crunch.

Cooking without recipes is a smart thing to do but it requires a little thought. It has the advantage that you do need to think whereas with recipes the thinking has been done for you.

Therefore I apologise for the above but I can assure you your variations on the above will produce a marvellous meal meaning strict adherence is unimportant.

But the important principle here is that in cooking anything containing mince it lends itself to being infused with great flavours at its very heart and very things that do that keep the texture open and tender.

The onions and the rice breakup the tenacious meat mince allowing its juices to surround all the particles and sink into the rice. The egg and the psyllium do the same plus bind the mix.

These principles will work with any mince, even elephant ( heaven forbid ) or crocodile or fish.

Just heating a piece of mince will result in a uninteresting product which in which the meat has contracted to squeeze out the natural juices to become hard.

Shaping up a public mind set about better food

Allowing that we, the paying public, are the problem that gives power to Big Foodie, how do we now get on an even footing to fight back? The middle men, the main ones, that is, are the supermarkets and in no way is it in their immediate interest to undermine the manufacture and presentation of pricey alternatives to basic foods that they sell. They almost certainly would not allow warnings to be attached to the shelves holding such products nor offer cheaper and healthier alternatives.

The governments are weak and will give into pressure to avoid widespread public warnings.

Education of the public is the answer - but allowing the media are dependent on advertising revenue they will be reticent in taking part so where to we go from there.

NGO’s (non-government organisations,) and non- profit organisations could be a start.

Assistance from Crowdfunding ( the practice of funding a project or venture by raising monetary contributions from a large number of people and is a form of crowd-sourcing and of alternative finance.) could underwrite advertising and media exposure.

But how to shape up the project so it captures the public imagination! The spectrum of foods being involved is gigantic, the responsible companies so wealthy and the likelihood of litigation so high that a foolproof algorithm is necessary.

Big ships take a lot of turning!!

Please let me know your ideas.

Food for thought

Perhaps one of the reasons Big Foodie and it's mostly unhealthy products have such a penetration into the food market is that the public itself allows it. How has this come about?

I think, as always, of the convenience factor. Decades ago the housewife stayed at home, looked after the kids and spent good deal of time organising the purchase and the husbanding of food in and into the household. The cultural finesse that she would have had handed down from her mother would express itself as a continuance uninterrupted and inviolate.

In the twentieth and now twenty first centuries across the world women are supplementing their husbands income by working full or part time and are therefore not in the house to offer time to that cultural culinary finesse that they once did.

Big Foodie has hopped on the bandwagon and with money, mass production, a packaging revolution and intense marketing practices filled the food shops with a spectrum of items aimed at a minimum of preparation to seduce the now time deprived housewife.

Big Foodie is making billions from goods that cost next to nothing. The first high price the public is paying is, at the counter, a lot more money. The second price is that they are paying for a stale product,  the cost of seductive and mostly non-recyclable packaging, and the highest price of all for a product that is almost universally unhealthy containing a range of preservatives with documented risks to cardiovascular and other body systems.

What is needed is for the public, male and female, to be made aware both of risk of Big Foodie products and how easy it is, with a minimum of inconvenience, to make something at home that is better and cheaper.

The conglomerates that constitute Big Foodie must be stopped.

There is a breathtaking ruthlessness by the major food manufacturers to impose much of their rubbish on their paying public. For example Kellogg's appear to have no conscience producing breakfast cereals for kids with chocolate incorporated in them with the concomitant sugar in them as well. In a world where diabetes, obesity is rife and kids are suffering from dental caries in droves this company patently is showing that its share of the breakfast cereal  market should not suffer. This is rank and overt capitalist greed and shows a complete lack of conscience. In the face of well published evidence for the health risks they show they don't care. Many other major cereal brands follow suit and do, if not precisely, something else to enhance acceptance of their product. Quaker make an oat breakfast wherein the oats are treated to become a seemingly more acceptable product through a treatment that makes them a runny slurry when hot milk is added. Their treatment of the oats has reduced the roughage effect of normal rolled oats for the advertised impression of something creamy and hot for breakfast totally denying their customers of a healthy alternative.
For this they charge a ridiculous extra cost and make so much money they can pay an astronaut to push their product on prime time TV.

A solution might be to legislate labeling on all such products a cheaper and healthier alternative in easily readable print so it cannot be missed just as the health warnings now exist on cigarette packets.

Acrylamide again! This time a real poison to worry about in diets and food production.

Caramelising of food is a vital part of baking, of frying, grilling, barbecuing, toasting, roasting, and perhaps even 'popping'. If there is a colour change from on the way from white, through all stages of brown to black you can bet that its got acrylamide there or in the making.
What seems to be missing from all the warnings on acrylamide is the crisping factor. Crisping, crunchiness, crackling, crumbly, crusty; all these so desirable in everything we cook - pies, cakes, pastries, breads, and of course toasts and crisps that come to mind so easily. Crispness and the crunch infers a brittleness. That in itself is not bad but in the nature of the rush haste to get food into our mouths and down our gullets it is inevitable that that quite a bit of trauma is imposed on the lining of the oesophagus and upper stomach. So not only is our body coping with a roughness or sharpness, it is the most burned food that is doing this damage and thereby adding a mechanical damage to the chemical damage causing chronic inflammation, a precursor of cancer. See here
As old as cooking itself. That's how long mankind has been exposed to acrylamide. And it is as certain as day follows night that it was the caramelised animals, at first unwittingly caught up in fires, and then of course purposely, whose smell and taste inured forever man to the concept of cooking.
And it is caramelising, be it sugars and refined carbohydrates, protein or fat that produces in one form or another the acrylamides that are now getting a public airing. Cancer Research UK says crisps, chips and biscuits are major sources of acrylamide here

The headlines generated in the UK were widespread in the tablet press and well represented in the broadsheets. However no matter how much by way of warning was made the press in an attempt to expand their copy pressed many scientists and sceptics to undermine the thrust of the information.
The FSA in the UK, the Food Standards Agency, for once was trying to get a message across to prevent serious illness in the wide sense. Its failure in the horse meat scandal brought many a caustic and cynical remark - but it was at least a start.
However important it seemed for the public to be aware of acrylamide in cooking practice there was an immediate softening or amelioration of the problem by a scale of recommended level that were acceptable - this is a failure - if something is poisonous any exposure is dangerous.BBC Radio 4 article and Britains Food Standard Authority  report here.

Although the advice to cook no more than produces a golden colour is on the way to solving the problem it is only that because any colour change infers the presence of acrylamides. There needs a rethink on the way of capturing crunch in eating without the worry of producing what is indeed a toxic substance.

                   

Diet is a vital force for survival of any country

Diet is a vital force for survival for any country so 'What Are The Fundamentals In Planning Vegetable Farming On Local and Industrial Scale?’

We are learning in the ‘West’ slowly and surely that we need to know for certain that what we put in our mouth is what the body that has that mouth really is able to process and use for good sustenance and nutrition without any deleterious effect arising.

This does not mean eating something just because of tradition, family, friends and neighbours; not because it is cheap, not because we are pressurised by Big Foodie through advertising and shop mark-up.

We are all different and though our needs will be similar for whole swaths of people and even whole races or sections of a race  it is important that individual needs and nuances of capacity to digest and properly utilise  any single food especially a traditional staple.

In respect of this we in the West have, for centuries, relied on bread as a staple - ‘bread is the staff of life’ is a maxim many were brought up on. Bread was made from spelt and wheat that was low in gluten.

However, over the last fifty years, bread manufacturers discovered that by using wheat that had higher gluten content they could produce a loaf of bread that needed less grain, would hold more water and go stale less quickly. Of course this was a winner all round for them - less grain, they could charge you for the extra water they put in and the shelf life was extended. Bread manufacturers made lots of extra money selling the public a loaf that had less grain and therefore the ‘goodness’ of the grain.

It turns out that many, it might be as higher than 70%, who buy bread, are sensitive in some degree or other to the very thing that made the bread manufacturers rich -  gluten.

This complex protein, very good at holding water in the bread mix, appears to be sensitising many people making for a whole range of symptoms and even illnesses in the West.

Gradually, in supermarkets across the UK, whole sections of shelving are devoted to ‘Free From’. They don’t even have to say what - it is understood - gluten.

The point of the conversation about bread was to show that Big Foodie, in this case the bread manufacturers, have through their greed, changed what was a relatively harmless staple food.

It is important that those people who will oversee our food sourcing, look objectively at who is pushing a particular food type before they put it in their mouths. It is worth noting that Big Foodie will not pick up the tab for the damage its product do to society, the millions that society has to pay in taxes to sustain, for instance, in the UK, our National Health System.