Tim Worstall

Trivial in and of itself, yes: Heinz, the American company which bought the famous British brand in 2005, has changed the celebrated concoction that includes tomatoes, malt vinegar, molasses, dates, tamarind and secret spices to reduce the salt content. The previous version of the brown sauce, which has become synonymous with fry-up breakfasts and bacon [...]

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That’s good then. 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 [...]

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Yesterday I cooked something that rocked my world so much, I thought I’d share it on my blog and who knows, it may become a occasional feature. Since it’s aimed a blokes or the kitchen-impaired (like me) the kind of food I’ll do will be quite simple and much more aimed at taste than looks. [...]

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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 [...]

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The assorted boxes of mars, snickers, bouty and twix ice creams have just hit rural Portugal. Hmm. Think I prefered putting the original choccy bars in the freezer to be honest….

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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% [...]

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Isn’t it just terrible? 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.

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Someone really needs to have a word with these people: 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 [...]

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Other banks such as Barclays got in on the act, but commodity funds remained a pretty small business – until the turn of the millennium, when two things happened. First, the US Congress rushed through a piece of legislation that permitted pension funds and others to invest in these new commodity indices. No. The CFMA [...]

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Nor the organic manure spread on them: Beansprouts are a common ingredient in salads and stir frys, but have previously been blamed for major health scares. They were held responsible for a serious outbreak of Salmonella in Britain last year and 17 E.coli-related deaths in Japan in 1996. On Sunday evening, Gert Lindemann, agriculture minister [...]

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So, there’s an outbreak of e coli. Thus Ms. Blythman, our “food writer” decides to leap in with her prejudices: With food scandals now arriving in a steady stream, we need to understand that by its very nature, our industrialised, globalised food system begets public health problems. It is geared to churning out vast volumes [...]

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This new report of theirs fails I’m afraid. Growing a Better Future. Fails on two levels. The first will seem a little technical but it’s summed up here: It should be emphasized that the model does not capture potential increases in agricultural productivity that are likely to result from increased research and development efforts incentivized [...]

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“So, Boss, how we gonna ge’ tha’ Marmite contrac‘ ‘en?” (For yes, Mockney is alive and well.) “Well, the way I see it, we’ve got to create a really good campaign….” “Yer, obvious, innit? Bu’ wha? Ang on, ang on, I gorr i’! (We’ll switch to subtitles as glottal stops spray the camera) We get [...]

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Notwithstanding the actions we must take in Operation Marmite, the Danes have managed to get the ban all wrong anyway. On purely scientific grounds. The Danish Veterinary and Food Administration has allegedly made the importation of Marmite illegal, apparently on the grounds that the yeast extract is fortified with vitamin B, and therefore doesn’t meet [...]

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Publishing what it called “the most authoritative ever report of bowel cancer risk” today (MON), the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) is recommending that people limit their intake of red meat to 500g a week, or just over a pound in weight. That is “roughly the equivalent of five or six medium portions of roast [...]

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Well, it’s a cute theory, no doubt about that: It goes like this. QE II in the US has led to massively more money floating around the system, this has fed commodity price rises, one of which is wheat, the staple food in much of the Arab world is bread, thus rising bread prices, caused [...]

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Used as evidence that the supermarkets aren’t a great deal: Such supposed bargains help maintain the fiction that UK supermarkets are cheap places in which to shop, when in fact Britain’s rate of food inflation is three times greater than the average 2.1% for the G7 group of nations. As a nation we import a [...]

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So we’ve this development problem, see? We need to get African agriculture up to speed. Current yields are pitiful and by and large it’s horribly inefficient peasant farming. That needs to change, just as our own agriculture changed over the past two centuries. Quite apart from anything else, the introduction of efficient agriculture will mean [...]

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No, it simply won’t work. Common ingredients in fast food, ready meals and drinks should be taxed as a public health measure to curb soaring rates of obesity and diabetes, according to a leading epidemiologist. The scheme, proposed by Sir Nicholas Wald, director of the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine in London, would raise the [...]

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Well, OK, possibly the best bacon cheeseburger in the world according to some bloke I’ve never heard of. However, if does actually look darn good and available only for a short time in East London. My problem would be how to have a bacon cheeseburger, the beef chili dog, fries and the onion rings all [...]

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