“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 great way to reduce your sales!”

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.

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 and a pizzaiolo who can tell the oil’s temperature just by looking at it – it’s such a hard technique that it hasn’t caught on outside Naples,” he said.

They might have invented the dipping it in batter first though…..

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: they’re, umm, price cuts, right?

So, we’ve got to make food more affordable by banning price cuts.

Yup, that’ll do it.

The following question will be our focus: how can we ensure good food is affordable and valued in a world where global competition and climate change are expected to result in 30 per cent price increases over the next 15 years?

So food is expected to increase in price rather less than trend growth in incomes then? So food will be becoming, as a portion of incomes, ever cheaper?

Just what actually is the problem here?

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 companies grumble that their efforts fail because of bad press – yet it is often entirely their own fault that the public are so suspicious.

This could be true. It’s even possible that it is true. However, I wouldn’t use this example as proof of it:

The reality is, though, that efforts of scientists to feed the world sustainably rarely see the light of day. Twenty years ago, biotechnologists created super-nutritious GM “Golden Rice,” transforming rice with genes from a daffodil to add nutritious beta carotene. It was hoped it would reduce Vitamin A deficiency in developing countries. But the project has encountered many technological difficulties, while attracting fierce opposition from pressure groups.

Golden Rice has been stopped in its tracks by an unholy alliance of woo merchants and NGOs. It actually does exactly what it says on the tin, provides a Vitamin A enriched rice. No royalties are payable, there is no copyright, patent or trademark restricting use. Yet all the mastery of PR has been deployed to stop the deployment of this “Frankenrice”. Supported of course by just the sort of useful idiots who write food columns about organics etc. You know, the Rose Princes of this world.

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 after producing their first patty they will be able to scale up the process to create affordable artificial meat products.

Mass-producing beef, pork, chicken and lamb in the lab could satisfy the growing global demand for meat – forecast to double within the next 40 years – and dramatically reduce the harm that farming does to the environment.

Because if we don’t have the animals to produce the shit then we cannot have organic fertilisers.

The very thing which means that we don’t need to limit ourselves to the low meat diet which organic farming implies (given the land hunger of the technique) is the very thing which make organic farming impossible at any scale.

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 potatoes, even bananas (which in some areas provide a really surprising percentage of caloric intake).

That’s what is actually needed: to continue Norman Bourlag’s work and direct it to those African crops. And it is what Bourlag was doing towards the end of his life. It had to be provately funded though as, for some very strange and weird reason, none of the aid agencies were interested in funding the one thing that had already saved the odd few hundred million or billion lives.

We also get the flat out lie which is common in such pieces:

Cassava root, ground to a flour and cooked up as a doughy paste, is a traditional staple. It fills children up but has almost no nutritional value.

Bollocks. It is low in protein, this is true, not a huge amount of vitamins in it either. But it contains carbohydrates and yes, carbohydrates are indeed nutrition.

Its composition shows 60-65 percent moisture, 20-31 percent carbohydrate, 1-2 percent crude protein and a comparatively low content of vitamins and minerals. However, the roots are rich in calcium and vitamin C and contain a nutritionally significant quantity of thiamine, riboflavin and nicotinic acid.

Note those penultimate two vitamins: we tend to add them to cereals made from maize precisely because maize does not contain these essentials. Indeed, maize on its own is an insufficient diet: pellagra caused by an excessive reliance on incorrectly processed maize. Just as kwashiokor can be casued by an excessive reliance upon cassava….it’s the protein lack there.

But can we please get this straight? Cassava may well be an insufficient source of the total nutrition required but it is not true to say that it “has almost no nutritional value”. Cassava plus eggs plus fruit would not be a particularly delicious diet but it would be sufficient. Carbohydrates, protein and vitamins…..

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 no nutritional value is rather making fools of those hundreds of millions for whom it is the staple of life.

“Its composition shows 60-65 percent moisture, 20-31 percent carbohydrate, 1-2 percent crude protein and a comparatively low content of vitamins and minerals. However, the roots are rich in calcium and vitamin C and contain a nutritionally significant quantity of thiamine, riboflavin and nicotinic acid.”

I have to admit, it’s the first time I’ve come across a “health” campaign that wants to ban fruit and root vegetables.

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?