neil_merseyside
Guru
- Location
- Wirral
Good frozen veg is 2 hrs old, fresh is anyone's guess, same for fish generally, though I do prefer to see the fish I buy - so I can be misty eyed about buying fresh fish, rather than buying misty eyed fish...
Obesity
- Thread starter Blue Hills
- Start date
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Reynard
Guru
- Location
- Cambridgeshire, UK
Fortunately, the one my friend volunteers for does take fresh produce.
One of the shops involved in the project is actually a local farm shop that also has a bakery, it's not just the big retailers who are contributing. The project delivers food boxes (very healthy by food bank standards) and runs a community larder similar to your produce stall, where anyone in the village can avail themselves of what's there in return for a donation, regardless of their means.In urban areas, I think we're back to the disconnect between people and food. Can they cook it, do they have the means to cook it, that sort of thing. Nothing wrong with muddy potatoes IMHO (see, we're back to tatties again!) as they do keep longer than the washed ones.
Sikh temples are great places for that sort of thing - they do a heck of a lot for their local community, including providing meals regardless of your faith or means etc. And it's all vegetarian. Have to say, that sort of food really floats my boat.
Reynard
Guru
- Location
- Cambridgeshire, UK
KnittyNorah
Über Member
- Location
- The Frozen North (of England)
Yes there's definitely a disconnect - and not just at the kitchen stage; there's even more of a disconnect earlier in the process. There has been for a long time; it's really not a recent thing at all.
When I was a student, in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I used to work in the 'equine industry' in the summer holidays. Pay wasn't much good, but food and accommodation were provided and I could often take my own horse along for free. One year I got quite a decent job - it paid about £10/week with food and accommodation provided, at a large school 'outdoor activity holiday centre' in the Brecon Beacons which offered a variety of activities, mainly sports - pony-trekking, sailing, canoeing, climbing, hill-walking etc - and one of the activities that started being offered during the summer I worked there was a half-day visit to a local working farm. There was always a great deal of horror and refusal of food - even to the extent that the menu had to be changed around and the groups that had been on the farm visit got fish fingers and chips, rather than anything recognisably eggy, milky or vegetable - because the kids had suddenly realised, to their unutterable horror, that eggs came out of hen's bums, milk came from 'cows t!ttie$' and that veggies were either 'covered with dirt and worms' or had 'creepy-crawlies and flies and things on them'. Good thing there was no mention of bacon or sausages ...
A neighbour of mine, who anyone would think of as a well-educated intelligent person, was simply horrified one day when my next-door neighbour, who is head gardener on a large private estate, had a few fat woodpigeons and a pheasant he'd been given by the gamekeeper, and he'd laid them out on the bonnet of his car while he'd sorted out somewhere to clean, pluck and/or hang them. She kept saying 'but Lizzie they're birds! Wild birds! With all their beautiful feathers - birds! Do you think he's going to eat them?'
And I said 'W, you eat chicken don't you?'
'Yes' she answered 'But what's that got to do with it?'
'Chickens are birds, too. Very pretty, some of them are...'
'Oh ...'
Reynard
Guru
- Location
- Cambridgeshire, UK
Yes there's definitely a disconnect - and not just at the kitchen stage; there's even more of a disconnect earlier in the process. There has been for a long time; it's really not a recent thing at all.
When I was a student, in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I used to work in the 'equine industry' in the summer holidays. Pay wasn't much good, but food and accommodation were provided and I could often take my own horse along for free. One year I got quite a decent job - it paid about £10/week with food and accommodation provided, at a large school 'outdoor activity holiday centre' in the Brecon Beacons which offered a variety of activities, mainly sports - pony-trekking, sailing, canoeing, climbing, hill-walking etc - and one of the activities that started being offered during the summer I worked there was a half-day visit to a local working farm. There was always a great deal of horror and refusal of food - even to the extent that the menu had to be changed around and the groups that had been on the farm visit got fish fingers and chips, rather than anything recognisably eggy, milky or vegetable - because the kids had suddenly realised, to their unutterable horror, that eggs came out of hen's bums, milk came from 'cows t!ttie$' and that veggies were either 'covered with dirt and worms' or had 'creepy-crawlies and flies and things on them'. Good thing there was no mention of bacon or sausages ...
A neighbour of mine, who anyone would think of as a well-educated intelligent person, was simply horrified one day when my next-door neighbour, who is head gardener on a large private estate, had a few fat woodpigeons and a pheasant he'd been given by the gamekeeper, and he'd laid them out on the bonnet of his car while he'd sorted out somewhere to clean, pluck and/or hang them. She kept saying 'but Lizzie they're birds! Wild birds! With all their beautiful feathers - birds! Do you think he's going to eat them?'
And I said 'W, you eat chicken don't you?'
'Yes' she answered 'But what's that got to do with it?'
'Chickens are birds, too. Very pretty, some of them are...'
'Oh ...'
Oh my Sainted Aunt!!!
I'm laughing, but...You're right though, it's not a recent thing and it has become endemic. Everything comes so neatly packaged and prepared that it's almost convenient to lose sight of where things came from and what they're actually made of.
Actually, people's reaction to offal does make me chuckle... I'm rather partial to kidneys (especially with bacon) myself.
OP
OP
- Location
- London
fair point - i was really talking about pre-prepared meals. Lidl fig rolls get me through a fair few rides, plus in extremis lidl wine gums. Main source of my energy on rides is my homemade cycle snack.
OP
OP
- Location
- London
yep quite - full veg keeps for a long time in a fridge if you keep it cooler. Which of course means that it is very hard to run out of veg.
There was also of course, not to my great surprise, the recent health scare/warning on bagged mixed veg.
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OP
OP
- Location
- London
maybe your "cooking" is more complicated than mine. I'm not one for involved recipes except on special occasions - my basic idea is that if it takes longer than 20 minutes to cook all in from initial chopping to eating it probably isn't worth eating. I listen to the radio at the same time.
OP
OP
- Location
- London
A good friend of mine was genuinely horrified to find that I bought much of my veg from london street markets rather than the supermarket. "but it's dirty" he said - wasn't entirely sure that he was serious for a while to be honest. That would have been in a period when the major supermarkets, sainsburys etc, charged notoriously high prices for Veg.
Randomnerd
Bimbleur
- Location
- North Yorkshire
Apologies for skimming the last dozen or so pages, chaps and chapesses. The first twenty-odd were very interesting and informative.
Neuro-divergent brains - I’m a recent initiate to that tribe - react very differently to appetites than do neuro-typical brains. Others have posted interesting stuff about this. Dopamine, dopamine, dopamine. And more dopamine please. And those brains, and the people who own them, have no control over that. Or much less than a “normal” brain would have.
As an aside, there is over-use of the word “normal”, wherever we go. Honestly, I never am sure what it means. Surely everything human is on a scale? How can one decide what is right in the middle, or correct, or acceptable? My new mantra is “beware those who call things normal”. Your maths dudes would probably use words like “mean” and “median” and ”average”. I’ll go away and summon up my inner Tim Hartford and learn how to do it all better myself.
If you do have real difficulty with maintaining a healthy weight range, or a weight range with which you are okay, do have a think about your own potential neuro-divergence. There may be a causal link. Of the five or so percent of the adult population with neurological disorder, only ten percent of those people are ever diagnosed and treated. A sad and shameful statistic.
Of course I’m not trying to say that many or most people overweight have a neurological disorder. Modern food systems are obese: they are messed up, engorged monsters. Modern mass produced food is obese: cheap and plentiful. Modern living is obese: sedentary, push-button and automated. Gratification is under constant fingertip control.
Idly, I sometimes wonder at the apathy which abounds all around this engrained health challenge. Witness this last couple of years for me:
My “fighting“ weight - at my very best I am a stocky barrel of gristle, lard and sinew from a life wrangling wood and stone - is fourteen stones. At 5’10“ that probably has my BMI at 27. My “capitulating and trying to outrun flabbiness” weight is sixteen stones - locked woods gates during the pandemic; farms and domestic gardens closed to all-comers; the panic of possible eviction for over a year; unmedicated. That probably would mean my heart might pop at the next axe-swing or hammer blow this season.
Fortunately, I can fight my own corner, get access finally to help re neurological challenges etc, as spelled out in the Personals. And, despite all other obstacles, I can still get out into nature to move about, or ride my bike, or take on more physical work as I get stronger.
Still, my GP and the surgery more widely are not clambering over one another to offer help for fat-fighting. The offers are oblique. I can only speak for myself, and the few other middle aged men I know locally who variously struggle to keep to a healthy weight: help is probably there, but it is all rather passive.
Six years ago I ran a woodcraft programme for young people in Sheffield. We built an outdoor gym to entertain those clients, who were at risk of leaving school with no qualifications. The wood gym was a real success. Ropes, pulleys, wooden weights, wooden press bench, drag a bag of sand uphill. Chin up branch. The group designed most of it. Great stuff. Hours of fun and competition and engagement and calorie burning.
Mentioned it to my GP In passing, and he tried to get a meeting with the local health pyramid, whatever that is. And he tried and he tried, and in the end we just gave up. He was right into getting something off the ground locally for people recovering from operations or for people who needed to be motivated to walk and exercise. But, the wheels just turned so slowly, we all got sick of waiting and moved on.
Food is also a very nuanced political issue. Farming practices need to change worldwide, but definitely in the UK. We are too reliant on the old habit of importing and relying on the commonwealth, and the danger is that this will deepen as we move away from Europe to new food market deals. A recent detailed study by some very clever French scientists has concluded that the UK can sustain itself in food production if it moves to a more diverse, modern use of land, and if people are encouraged to change how they consume. All bets are off that the Tories will bring about anything radical that might upset Big Agric.
Poor people have far less access to high nutrition foods, and have a much narrower choice and less buying power toward eating healthily. They are less mobile, less informed, less served.
In the last five years I’ve worked in schools in areas of high deprivation where it is not unusual for children to be sent to school with mouldy bread for their sandwiches. Projects where young people are asked to bring food for lunch outdoors must always be underpinned with a food budget for those who have nothing to bring. If we can, we ensure that food is part of the offer, otherwise shame and embarrassment often ensue for those without.
I sell spoons and wooden things for the kitchen at a local food circle, where local producers all gather to sell their wares within a 25 mile radius of the city. Small farms and micro growers, and little makers like me, all cranking in on bikes or sharing lifts. But the clientele are still almost all middle class, despite the site being slap bang in the poorest part of the city. No matter, you just have to keep pressing on, and trying to aim for change.
We all need to play our part in this. We ought to stop pouring our cash down the necks of the absurdly obese multi-nationals running our food production and instead feed to healthy plumpness the local, the real, the small, the sustainable growers, makers, producers.
Neuro-divergent brains - I’m a recent initiate to that tribe - react very differently to appetites than do neuro-typical brains. Others have posted interesting stuff about this. Dopamine, dopamine, dopamine. And more dopamine please. And those brains, and the people who own them, have no control over that. Or much less than a “normal” brain would have.
As an aside, there is over-use of the word “normal”, wherever we go. Honestly, I never am sure what it means. Surely everything human is on a scale? How can one decide what is right in the middle, or correct, or acceptable? My new mantra is “beware those who call things normal”. Your maths dudes would probably use words like “mean” and “median” and ”average”. I’ll go away and summon up my inner Tim Hartford and learn how to do it all better myself.
If you do have real difficulty with maintaining a healthy weight range, or a weight range with which you are okay, do have a think about your own potential neuro-divergence. There may be a causal link. Of the five or so percent of the adult population with neurological disorder, only ten percent of those people are ever diagnosed and treated. A sad and shameful statistic.
Of course I’m not trying to say that many or most people overweight have a neurological disorder. Modern food systems are obese: they are messed up, engorged monsters. Modern mass produced food is obese: cheap and plentiful. Modern living is obese: sedentary, push-button and automated. Gratification is under constant fingertip control.
Idly, I sometimes wonder at the apathy which abounds all around this engrained health challenge. Witness this last couple of years for me:
My “fighting“ weight - at my very best I am a stocky barrel of gristle, lard and sinew from a life wrangling wood and stone - is fourteen stones. At 5’10“ that probably has my BMI at 27. My “capitulating and trying to outrun flabbiness” weight is sixteen stones - locked woods gates during the pandemic; farms and domestic gardens closed to all-comers; the panic of possible eviction for over a year; unmedicated. That probably would mean my heart might pop at the next axe-swing or hammer blow this season.
Fortunately, I can fight my own corner, get access finally to help re neurological challenges etc, as spelled out in the Personals. And, despite all other obstacles, I can still get out into nature to move about, or ride my bike, or take on more physical work as I get stronger.
Still, my GP and the surgery more widely are not clambering over one another to offer help for fat-fighting. The offers are oblique. I can only speak for myself, and the few other middle aged men I know locally who variously struggle to keep to a healthy weight: help is probably there, but it is all rather passive.
Six years ago I ran a woodcraft programme for young people in Sheffield. We built an outdoor gym to entertain those clients, who were at risk of leaving school with no qualifications. The wood gym was a real success. Ropes, pulleys, wooden weights, wooden press bench, drag a bag of sand uphill. Chin up branch. The group designed most of it. Great stuff. Hours of fun and competition and engagement and calorie burning.
Mentioned it to my GP In passing, and he tried to get a meeting with the local health pyramid, whatever that is. And he tried and he tried, and in the end we just gave up. He was right into getting something off the ground locally for people recovering from operations or for people who needed to be motivated to walk and exercise. But, the wheels just turned so slowly, we all got sick of waiting and moved on.
Food is also a very nuanced political issue. Farming practices need to change worldwide, but definitely in the UK. We are too reliant on the old habit of importing and relying on the commonwealth, and the danger is that this will deepen as we move away from Europe to new food market deals. A recent detailed study by some very clever French scientists has concluded that the UK can sustain itself in food production if it moves to a more diverse, modern use of land, and if people are encouraged to change how they consume. All bets are off that the Tories will bring about anything radical that might upset Big Agric.
Poor people have far less access to high nutrition foods, and have a much narrower choice and less buying power toward eating healthily. They are less mobile, less informed, less served.
In the last five years I’ve worked in schools in areas of high deprivation where it is not unusual for children to be sent to school with mouldy bread for their sandwiches. Projects where young people are asked to bring food for lunch outdoors must always be underpinned with a food budget for those who have nothing to bring. If we can, we ensure that food is part of the offer, otherwise shame and embarrassment often ensue for those without.
I sell spoons and wooden things for the kitchen at a local food circle, where local producers all gather to sell their wares within a 25 mile radius of the city. Small farms and micro growers, and little makers like me, all cranking in on bikes or sharing lifts. But the clientele are still almost all middle class, despite the site being slap bang in the poorest part of the city. No matter, you just have to keep pressing on, and trying to aim for change.
We all need to play our part in this. We ought to stop pouring our cash down the necks of the absurdly obese multi-nationals running our food production and instead feed to healthy plumpness the local, the real, the small, the sustainable growers, makers, producers.
KnittyNorah
Über Member
- Location
- The Frozen North (of England)
Oh my Sainted Aunt!!!
You're right though, it's not a recent thing and it has become endemic. Everything comes so neatly packaged and prepared that it's almost convenient to lose sight of where things came from and what they're actually made of.
Actually, people's reaction to offal does make me chuckle... I'm rather partial to kidneys (especially with bacon) myself.
Not overly fond of kidneys tbh - but show me some liver, any liver ... mmmmmmm!
PaulSB
Squire
- Location
- Chorley, Lancashire
@Randomnerd - thank you. Excellent post.
Reynard
Guru
- Location
- Cambridgeshire, UK
KnittyNorah
Über Member
- Location
- The Frozen North (of England)
Lambs liver, very thinly sliced with a razor-sharp knife (easiest when semi-thawed/semi-frozen, if you're not a butcher by trade or don't have serious kitchen knife skills) and barely passed under (or over) a VERY hot grill, or bbq coals, so that it's only just coked and still juicy - although never bloody - in the centre. Ox liver, sliced and soaked overnight in yoghurt or milk. The resulting liquid then given to any deserving dog or cat in the vicinity, and the now-somewhat tenderised, and much milder-flavoured, liver cooked slowly until tender, with lots of onions and some chopped bacon. Mushrooms, too. Serve with plain , floury, mashed potatoes to soak up all that delicious thick gravy, and whatever other vegetable you like.Oooh yes, chicken livers!!!
You know, since becoming vegetarian, I've never missed steak or mince or chops, or even a roast - but I do miss liver!
Reynard
Guru
- Location
- Cambridgeshire, UK
I struggle with lamb or ox liver sometimes because the flavour is quite strong - hence a fondness for chicken livers, but I do have a recipe for liver cooked with orange, which is very nice.
Have to say, I do eat a lot less meat than I used to - I'd much rather have a little of a really *good* piece of meat and enjoy it. Although good doesn't necessarily mean expensive, just perhaps a less desirable cut. But if you know what to do with it, you still end up with something tasty.
If I had to be entirely truthful, I do prefer fish to meat, and I eat a lot of vegetarian food as well. For things like lasagna, cannelloni, chilli, curry etc, I actually prefer the veggie version.
What I don't get is how some of my friends can shovel an 8oz (or even bigger!) steak down the hatch, when the same piece will do me for two main meals, with some left over for a lunchtime sandwich.
