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 might eat?

Sigh.

The correct name for someone who does not discriminate between species to eat is omnivore.

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, certainly not calculus. Just a general understanding of what certain numbers are likely to be?

You know, like the arts graduates ikeep snarling at the rest of us about simple things like a sentence must contain a verb, it’s and its are different, that sort of level of thing?

Just numbers that any educated adult should have a rough idea of. UK GDP is around £1.4, £1.5 trillion, EU £15 trillion, there’s 60 odd million people in the country, the Earth’s 25,000 miles (ish) around in the middle, the Sun’s 90 to 100 million miles away……not trying to say that people have to be accurate, just aware of the rough numbers.

And that 1,450 calories won’t keep an adult alive in the Arctic for a week. Actually, it’s a little less than three Big Macs and also a little under 3/4 of the daily calorie requirement for a sedentary male in the UK.

Or somewhere between 1/3 and 1/4 of what you’d try to feed someone running around the Arctic.

I know, I know, it’s a hopeless task, asking the arts grads to find someone who can do sums but can they at least try to find people who are vaguely numerate?

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 balanced diet. This is total tripe (which, although famously cheap because it is famously disgusting, is still probably more expensive than a Big Mac); certainly, you could shop differently with the same money and win the approval of nutritionist Gillian McKeith, but if your aim is to avoid being hungry, you could not do that more cheaply.

I understand this strenuous avoidance of reality. Once you accept that crap food is an economic, not a moral choice, you have to accept a whole raft of unpleasant outcomes as a function of deprivation, not an illustration of a lack of backbone. You have to accept that 24,000 “lifestyle-related” yearly deaths from diabetes are related not to sloth but to poverty. Sure, it’s still a lifestyle, but it’s not a choice. You have to accept that the education agenda against obesity – vegetables and regular exercise – will never work (that should be obvious, just by looking at the data or, failing that, just by looking around).

It is vastly cheaper in terms of money to eat non-processed foods. According to t’internet this is 540 calories. For £2.39. This being a Big Mac.

Which is hugely expensive when compared to what can be done with a bit of bulk buying/cooking. Rice, onions, garlic, peas, sweetcorn maybe, add some ham (Iceland does big packs of, what 800 grammes of good ham offcuts for £1.75?) and you could feed 4 people as much as they wanted to stuff down their faces of risotto (or risotto like at least) for well under a tenner.

There really is a reason that things like pizza, stews, risottos, spaghetti, curries, pilafs and so on exist. They’re peasant food: lots of calories with enough (but not much more to be honest) protein and vitamins, some taste (the whole point of the cooking methods is to give them that taste) and above all, they’re cheap.

What they’re not though is instant. They’re absolutely fabulous if you’re cash poor, not so much if you’re time poor.

But that’s a very different matter, isn’t it?

Damn, you can even make a hamburger, chips and beans with it, a soup and a pudding for what MaccyD’s charges you for the Big Mac alone. And there’s absolutely nothing at all nutritionally wrong with a hamburger made from real identifiable meat and bread that has actually been within sight of wheat.

There are parts of the world where bad nutrition certainly is an economic matter. This is simply not true of the UK.

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 tonnes toast per tonne Marmite or 150 tonnes of toast needed overall.

And for extra marks, how many soft boiled eggs will you need to dip the Marmite soldiers in?

Please show your workings.

Umm, is this close enough to hte new maths to make it into a GCSE paper?

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 have turkey ham etc.

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 years, wouldn’t that be, with compounding, about a 30% rise?

Sure, we’ve not had 5% inflation for four years, but shouldn’t we be showing price changes relative to hte general inflation level, not just nominal?

The Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) this week reported that household expenditure is down, with money spent on groceries and eating out significantly reduced.

For if we don’t do that we don’t know whether that fall in grocery spending is a good or a bad thing, do we? Might be (unlikely at present but still could possibly be) that food is getting relativeley cheaper so people have to devote less of their budgets to getting the same amount.

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 around.

All about how awful speculation in foodstuffs is. How the WDM is fighting this evil.

Jeebus, as the piece I wrote for the Register will show, I’m one of the few arguing that the WDM are ignorant tosspots who have everything wrong about this. As the PR agency would have known if they’d bothered to read the piece they referred to.

Ellen Ockey? You’re a fool.

One other thing ocurs. Where in buggery is the WDM getting its money from to employ a friggin’ PR agency?

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 been whining that we throw away far too much of the food that we buy?

Or maybe it doesn’t work like that. It’s good if you waste less food because you are pure of heart but not good if you waste less food because you’re skint?

You know, intentions matter more than the environment?

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 for all those Manhattan cocktails.

It’s not just humans bedazzled and mislead by capitalism’s evil ways that go for junk food then.

“Why would I peel a fig?”

My assumption is for the same reason we peel cows really.

“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 German tonight’, either.”

Wasn’t there a TV show which made exactly this joke? Indian/Pakistani immigrants going off for “An English” on a Saturday night?

And I do believe that lots of people do eat “a German”….Hamburgers and Frankfurters anyone?

Modern mothers are much more adventurous in the kitchen and can prepare 25 per cent more dishes than their mothers, research suggests.

Being able to cook more things is not the same as being able to cook better.

I, for example, am a lousy cook and I’m a lousy cook at cooking everything from spag bog through to pheasant in port and cream sauce. I’m terrible at many more than 25 different dishes.

My father has perhaps four recipes and at at least two of them (his bread and his baked apples) he is an excellent cook.

Variety is not necessarily a signal of excellence.

The figures, compiled by the Consensus Action on Salt & Health (Cash) campaign group, came after the Department of Health announced bread accounts for more salt in our diet than any other food, making up almost a fifth of our daily intake.

So bread is around and about as salty as human beings then and is a good way for us to ingest this absolutely vital nutrient.

How nice of them to do the research, eh?

Because I was hungry, I used the following:

1 cabbage, sliced into strips
2 small tubs of cubed bacon (available in the “cold meats” section of most supermarkets – Tesco and Sainsbury’s do two small tubs in a blister pack). Scrag ends from the slicing machine at the deli or market are better.
1 onion, finely sliced
Bit of rich cheddar, grated
A pinch of coarse ground black pepper

You don’t need oil or butter because the bacon produces prodigious amounts of fat.

Warm a pan to a low heat (I turn the gas down as low as I can) and pour in the bacon. It should start to sizzle and release the fat. As soon as there is “enough” oil in the pan, add the onion.

Stir occasionally until the bacon just starts to show odd bits of browning.

It’s very important NOT to let the bacon cook too far before you start adding other ingredients, or it will become very crunchy. But if you’ve the bigger offcuts, cook more than small cubes.

Add in the cabbage and move everything around so that the cabbage is in contact with the pan. It’s a bit fiddly, but worth it.

Make sure that the white surfaces of the cabbage all get a bit of golden brown on them.

When the cabbage looks mostly golden,  add the cheddar to the pan. Crank the heat right up and stir for about a minute. as soon as the cheese starts to show signs of melting, take the pan off the heat (and turn the stove off!) and throw the whole shebang into a colander to drain off the fat.

Pour it straight out of the colander onto a plate, sprinkle with a pinch of pepper and tuck in. Not very pretty, but it tasted fucking epic!

Pah, I spit on Obo’s fancy foreign muck! Cabbage’n'bacon, can’t beat it.

Update: Guys, in the comments, please do go read Obo’s original. It’ll all make much more sense that way.

John Liu, a film-maker who has been documenting the transformation, told a conference on “human security” in Caux, Switzerland, this week that the results had “far exceeded expectations”. Other speakers had similarly surprising experiences. Yacouba Sawadogo – an innovative, illiterate and eloquent small farmer from Burkino Faso – experimented with digging holes every metre across his barren land and filling them with manure. His yields of millet and sorghum quickly jumped from nothing to 1,500 kilos a hectare in years of good rains, and tens of thousands of his neighbours have followed suit.

And Dr Chris Reij, of Amsterdam’s Vrije University, who has worked in the Sahel for over 30 years, described how farmers in Niger had greened five million hectares of unproductive land simply by protecting naturally sprouting tree seedlings from being eaten by goats. The result: an extra 500,000 tons of grain a year – enough to feed at least 2.5 million people.

He reckons that two thirds of the world’s degraded land could be similarly restored. But encouraging as the grassroots greening has been, it remains piecemeal, and largely unknown – still less supported – by local governments, let alone the world at large.

At the heart of such practices is “investment”.

Digging holes to put shit in doesn’t exactly cost a lot of money. But there’s most certainly a time and labour investment there.

And one of the things about human beings is that they’ll only make such investments when they get to at least share in, if not entirely capture, the rewards from such investments.

Which in turn means that a farmer will make such investments in upgrading “his” land, but is less likely to do so with communally owned land and really isn’t going to put the effort in at all if he doesn’t have secure tenure at all.

I dimly recall a story from one of the Sahel states (Burkina Faso I think) where a farmer had started planting trees. By the time the area became sylvan glades the government took the land off him. Something to do (from imperfect memory) with forests being state owned, farm land being privately I think. That’s really not the way to get people planting forests.

Similarly, all land in Ethiopia is state owned. The peasantry have “permanent” leases on the land. “Permanent” meaning “can be transferred by the government any time the government decides to”. This simply is not the way to get farmers to make these kinds of long term investments in the land.

Yes, I know that there are those who still whine about the enclosures of 300 years ago in the UK. But that is how you get long term investment in farmland and it is what needs to be done in other areas. Not necessarily the hedges and the walls, but the security of tenure.

Owners invest in the land: sharecroppers don’t.

Which brings me to an apocryphal (possibly) story about one of the greatest pieces of development aid ever. From the US to Madagascar. Interesting language they have there, requires specialist keyboards/typewriters. One of the aid officials noted that a really serious problem the farmers were having was registering land they had bought. Or inherited etc. Not because of corruption, feudal landlord vileness or anything. Just because the office that did the registrations couldn’t keep up with the volume of such.

So they had some fresh typewriters (not computers, for ‘leccie supply reasons) made up and delivered. This removed the bottleneck, provided provable security of tenure and cost a few thousand $.

Excellent work: and an interesting guide to where aid really ought to go. In working out what actually is the problem and then solving that specific problem.

Hmm.

Think I prefered putting the original choccy bars in the freezer to be honest….

Diabetes epidemic affecting 350m – and western fast food is to blame

See, it’s all hamburgers I tell you!

A few paras down:

Researchers also say that increased life expectancy is playing a major role.

Ah, so maybe it’s not just hamburgers then?

As to the causes, the team attribute 70% to ageing and 30% to the increased prevalence of other factors, with obesity and body mass the most important.

Actually, it’s fuck all to do with hamburgers.

It’s to do with having conquered that age old problem of the human condition: insufficient calories. For the vast majority of us (with some distressing and hopefully soon to be solved exceptions) there is no cost or availability limit on how many calories we can ingest.

Which calories, yes: we can’t all afford to eat nothing but prime rib. But that 2,000-4,000 calories a day, ranging from sensible to glutton levels of intake, is available, without problem or strain, to the majority of the global population for the first time ever.

Which is why we’re living longer, see?

But the headline will have done its work: off everyone will go blaming hamburgers when in fact, while there are side effects, we should be celebrating the fact that we’ve got enough food to cause minor problems rather than the not enough which causes serious ones. You know, diabetes being a better problem to have than death by starvation?

But West fears it will lead to more intensive units to produce cheap meat for Britain.

An actor is worried that we might solve humanity’s oldest problem. How to produce enough for everyone to eat.

We’ve overfished the “Big Five” – cod, haddock, tuna, salmon and prawns – and now supermarkets and marine conservationists are hoping to steer us towards more sustainable seafood. Like the megrim.

Both salmon and prawns are now farmed. As are tilapia, sturgeon, catfish and so on.

If you want to get people to eat “sustainably produced” fish then you need to get them eating ones that are farmed you moronic twats.