At Le Gavroche, the two-star Michelin restaurant in London, the chef-patron Michel Roux feeds his staff on potato peelings. This information, so in tune with our thrifty times, appears in Roux’s new autobiography. I asked how exactly he cooked them. The answer is that the peel is twice-fried in animal fat, like the best chips. Mr Roux added that the potatoes should be peeled with a knife, "so as to leave a little flesh on the skin" for the workers’ nourishment. Which is thoughtful of him. And inspiring for a nation that throws away 359,000 tonnes of potatoes every year.
Deep fried potato skins. So revolutionary that you can buy them at Tesco’s.
The rest of it is a rant about how the supermarkets control the food industry leading to:
Food waste, poor health and many of the failures of the farming economy share a cause: food is too cheap and for that you have to blame the downward pressure on prices of the supermarkets. We now have the cheapest food in real terms in modern history.
Food is too cheap.
Seriously.
Food is too cheap.
The very thing that makes civilisation possible at all. An agricultural surplus: that some fraction of the population working on the land can feed the total population, meaning that that second fraction can go on and do other things. Schoolsn’ospitals, music, libraries, jet planes and rockets, a legal system, houses and all of the rest depend upon the fact that food is cheap. That it doesn’t take the total resources of our society to feed ourselves.
And this tosspot wants to complain that cheap food is a bad idea?
3 responses so far ↓
1 JuliaM // Feb 8, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Well, of course he does. He provides food at an eye-watering mark up for people too stupid or too lazy to cook for themselves…
2 dearieme // Feb 8, 2009 at 5:22 pm
I can remember when the Observer was a decent rag. This is just shite-on-Sunday stuff.
3 Chris Gilmour // Feb 9, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Wasn’t the scandal that there’s so much more wasteage in food production from transit and pests and weeds and all that, we lose about 60% of crops planted before it even gets to the kitchen?
And then if there wasn’t so much wastage, food would be some significant percentage cheaper?
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