Tim Worstall

“And if all those bottles had our coating, we estimate that we could save about one million tons of food from being thrown out every year.” So, sales of ketchup and mayo decline by 1 million tonnes a year. It’s going to be interesting listening in on the sales call isn’t it? “Guys, we’ve a [...]

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The caption reads: “According to the WWF as many as 90% of all large fish have been fished out.’ ” Salmon…farmed….shrimp….farmed….snails…..farmed….. And we’re all out of Aurochs for your steak frites too Monsewer.  

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A third of Di Matteo’s business is folded and fried pizzas – typically stuffed with ricotta, provola cheese and cicoli, a local type of pancetta. For Neapolitans, he said, it is even more of a tradition than the margherita. “Fried pizza was bigger than oven-baked pizza in Naples until the 1950s. It needs good oil [...]

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It is the consumer, however, who needs the greatest help. Government and businesses must strive to support the parents who are trying to feed their families for less despite rising food prices. This is entirely possible. We must put a stop to grocery promotions which either result in waste or unnecessarily high consumption. These promotions: [...]

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Let’s be serious. We shouldn’t undermine credible efforts to solve the crisis in the world’s food supply. But rarely do the inventors of these technologies seem to understand why consumers are sceptical of their ideas and motives. There are dozens of examples of food technology “big talk” that has come to nought. Scientists and biotech [...]

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By generating strips of meat from stem cells researchers believe they can create a product that is identical to a real burger. The process of culturing the artificial meat in the lab is so laborious that the finished product, expected to arrive in eight months’ time, will cost about £220,000 (EUR250,000). But researchers expect that [...]

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Yes, quite: A combination of rising food prices, political instability and lack of technological progress in farming have meant that improvements in child nutrition here have proved hard to come by. It’s that last. The Green Revolution worked in wheat, rice, maize….but no one’s really done it yet for the African staple crops. Cassava, sweet [...]

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The analysis says: “Over half of all children in poor countries only eat three food items – staples such as cassava, which has no nutritional value at all, What do you mean no nutritional value? Cassava contains calories, calories are nutrition. Agreed that there’s not much interesting in cassava but to claim that it has [...]

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Apparently fructose is terribly bad for us. I have to admit, it’s the first time I’ve come across a “health” campaign that wants to ban fruit and root vegetables.

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This is a vegan explaining why she is a vegan. I find discrimination on the grounds of species as distasteful as discrimination on the grounds of race or sex. So to show how appalling discrimination between species is as to which you might eat you are going to discriminate between species as to which you [...]

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So the Scots are doing deep fried butter now. Nutritionists said its estimated calorie content was 1,450 – enough to keep an adult alive in the Arctic for a week. Jesus fucking christ, can we not get a few of these arts graduates to understand some basic numbers? Not asking for any arithmetic or anything, [...]

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This column is complete and total garbage. I’ve lost count of the number of rows I’ve had about that, many in public, one live on telly, during which the broadcaster Jonathan Maitland said this was a problem of education: if she knew how to shop better she would have been able to afford a more [...]

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Overnight, by a motorway? A cleanup operation is under way after a tanker carrying more than 20 tonnes of yeast extract – believed to be Marmite – overturned on a busy motorway. Average serving of Marmite, 4 grammes, so 250,000 servings to the tonne. Average weight of slice of bread, around 30 grammes, so 7.5 [...]

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Well, actually, there is. Ham can be seen as a method of curing meat*, not the name for the specific meat being cured. Thus a pastrami sandwich and a corned beef sandwich can be seen as being ham sandwiches. For the curing processes are the same as various ham curing processes.   *ie, we can [...]

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Meanwhile, Defra statistics show the price of meat has risen by 26 per cent since 2007, bread, cheese, eggs and milk by 27 per cent, and butter by a massive 40 per cent – driven by the spiralling cost of oil and poor harvests. Umm, if we had 5% inflation per year over those 4 [...]

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I know that the PR industry is not exactly a hot bed of superior intellectual activity but do they have to be quite so stupid? One of them has just written to me suggesting that as a result of something I wrote at the Register I might be interested in a video piece they’re touting [...]

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A third of all shoppers say that they are cooking with leftover food and scraps more than they were at the start of the year, according to a survey into shopping habits by the IGD, the food and grocery industry body. Won’t WRAP and all the environmentalists be pleased? You know, the people who have [...]

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Bees in NYC: Inevitably, the insects have adopted New York ways, as became evident this summer when they started producing red honey that tasted like cough medicine. It transpired that they were ignoring natural nectar to gorge on junk food – the sickly sweet waste sugar water produced by a factory that makes maraschino cherries [...]

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Just popped inside, wifey’s watching a cooking show (not feeling well) and I heard the presenter asking a chef: “Why would I peel a fig?” My assumption is for the same reason we peel cows really.

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Well, yes: “Every time we are interviewed by a German journalist they always say that British food has a terrible reputation, but that’s usually because they once went on a school exchange and were served beans on toast every night,” she said. “Jim always says, well, no one exactly says ‘I’m going out for a [...]

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