Sue&#39;s inane ramblings

No. But then I don't eat Quorn either. I don't want my food grown in any kind of factory. Ew.

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I'm not sure whether I would either... but if other people would, then I think I might be in favour of it - e.g. if it had potential to replace the horrible factory farming used by the likes of KFC and MacDonalds

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I'd rather the likes of KFC and McDonalds were replaced altogether. :-(

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Well, yes, but I don't see any sign of that happening in our lifetime.
It depresses me how much kids and teenagers seem to love them.

I am actually dreading the day that Microboy's friends are old enough to start having Macdonalds parties...

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Ah, MacDonalds parties... Still, from my childish, once-in-a-blue-moon-Saturday-treat of fillet o'fish and a vanilla milkshake to tonight's dinner...

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Ooh, very interested in that! Tell me what it's like. G likes celeriac.

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It's had its 2 hours in the oven and it looks delicious, and I've had a sneaky taste and it is. I can't eat any more before dinner at 8.30 though... If it's not too late to pop up the road and get one (if they have one) I would recommend it! I covered mine with regular Halen Mon and black pepper.

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I must try it. Would it be a bit much as a side veg at Xmas, do you reckon?

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perfectlyvague.livejournal.com

I was thinking about them the other day...do they even have them any more? Surely they'd cause moral scandal in West London?

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I guess people have a bizarre belief that "natural" is the same as "good for you" (forgetting the generations of valiant dead mushroom eaters who ate the wrong type of natural) so we have a slight instinctive squick at the "wrong type" of unnatural.

That is, for example, McDonalds is "heavily processed" so that's bad whereas, say, a good quality malt whisky is "carefully aged" which is obviously different (although it's had a lot more and a lot more expensive processing).

Actually, the whole thing is quite weird. The hydroponics movement made "grown in a lab" seem appealing (at least to a certain type of person). If that kind of psychological magic could be worked then people would likely accept it.

If it could be packaged correctly for the "ooh it's natural it must be good" types then I think it would work well. Also, of course, there are some (slightly specious) ecological arguments that can be made about land-take and things (by growing it you don't have to do the wasteful thing of growing food which you feed to a cow which you then eat). Package it as eco-friendly animal-kind meat perhaps?

Still, it's very hard to predict what processes consumers will say "ewww factory" and what consumers will say "yum, natural".

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Ooh, it's like hippy top trumps... I wonder if "cruelty free" + "Eco-friendly" beats "organic" + "all natural"

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Well, it's worth mentioning that organic (particularly of veg) is not necessarily at all good for the environment because organic food is a lot more inefficient to produce (usually, not always, takes up more land to produce the same number of kg of carrots).

We will have to see who has the better advertisements and what we can get used to. I mean I bet the first person who tried to get someone interested in eating blue cheese had a pretty hard sell:

"So, you let the milk go really really off and added some kind of fungus."
"Sure."
"And you want me to help you clean it up and boil everything it's touched?"
"Not quite."

Also, perhaps it was just my friends group but "tofu" has been rehabilitated from "what the heck is this weird processed gloop" to "yummy all-natural tofu".

I wonder if, also, people like Heston Blumenthal who use "science" in food preparation can get people past the natural/unnatural idea? I mean there's no way someone can say an aerosol gel poached in liquid nitrogen is particularly "natural".

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Mmmm, tofu.
And it's true... I can only eat blue cheese if I don't think about it.

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Incidentally, I think the whole "factory produced is bad" is quite a recent phenomenon. I once saw some tremendous footage from the 1950s of a BBC documentary about the advances in food production. There was a lot of stuff about simple bread making which today would have people going "oh my god, no way on earth I'm eating bread now" -- I mean simple shots of large scale addition of bread and flour and batch production of things which nowadays would have people running for the local bakery (which is why bread adverts tend to have pictures of lovely men in white uniforms doing things by hand).

So, I guess that since it's a "last 50 years" thing that people have expressed a preference there's a hope that the phenomenon will reverse and we'll lose the squeamishness. (Plus, there's a lot of hand-prepared food from, say, the victorian era that lots of people now would turn their noses up). So, who knows what will be acceptable and/or considered delicious in another 25-30 years. After all, the same type of people who go "natural or nothing" will often cram down all manner of ineffective or untested pills and potions from Holland and Barrett and the like because it's carefully marketted. Also, looking at recipe cards from the 1970s often makes people feel nauseous.

Incidentally "sausage making" is sometimes used as code around here for trying to get grant funding (in particular from the European Union). You want the sausage but you really really don't want to look at what goes into the sausage if you can help it.

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Lol at "sausage making" - I haven't come across that one.

And god, yes re: 70s recipe cards. I hope that there is a special circle of hell for whoever invented spam fritters.

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I used to have spam fritter and chips every day for lunch at school. It's a miracle I didn't have a heart attack right then and there.

Look at this collection of horror:

http://www.candyboots.com/wwcards/celerylog.html

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Dear god, that is a crime against celery... and that's saying something.

Even as a small child I was disgusted by spam fritters. That and the school mash, which was clearly nothing other than watery 'Smash'. (As every ex-student knows, the only way to make Smash palatable is to add half a block of Lurpak and huge quantities of ground pepper)

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Aw... those smash robots laughing at people for the time taken to prepare proper mash. I miss them.

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perfectlyvague.livejournal.com

Me too, use to have to hide spam (and get nun-whipped for it) and smash.

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Oh god. mushy peas too. I've only recently started to concede that these may not be the work of Satan. But when I was a child I was convinced that mushy peas tasted of FARTS!

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snorkel-maiden.livejournal.com

In theory yes I'd eat it and have no problem with it. In practice I wouldn't, because I've been veggie for so long that for me now meat = ick. Though I can cope with Quorn and so on.

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Probably cos quorn doesn't really taste that much like meat. I do love quorn saussies - they seem to have got suddenly tastier.

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Some of those veggie sausages are as good as or better than meat sausages IMHO and the same with veggie haggis.

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Ive got a veggie haggis in the fridge... Only problem is I've never tasted real haggis so I'll have nothing to compare it with

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