the food rant thread

[Kim]

although in the days of the Exodus it's possible there was some health implication associated with meat and milk that came from the same animal.

Well, if we're talking about boiling goats in their own milk, and making uninformed guestimates about the capacity of the udder with respect to the volume of the entire goat, as well as the rate at which it's likely to re-fill, I'd say that unless you've got access to refrigeration it's an entirely stupid idea, rather than just kinky.

[Jaded]

god made broth go bad until Pasteur found out it was little microbule things.

I guess he'd get pissed off if you could prove that shellfish goes off in hot weather because science.

[contango]

although in the days of the Exodus it's possible there was some health implication associated with meat and milk that came from the same animal.

Well, if we're talking about boiling goats in their own milk, and making uninformed guestimates about the capacity of the udder with respect to the volume of the entire goat, as well as the rate at which it's likely to re-fill, I'd say that unless you've got access to refrigeration it's an entirely stupid idea, rather than just kinky.

Sorry, I didn't word my post very well. The "meat from the same animal" was in the sense that the kid comes from the mother, as does the milk. Not that it was about boiling an animal in its own milk.

I'm still speculating, as someone already said it's easy to see why shellfish on a hot day without refrigeration is a Really Bad Idea although whether it's a bad idea because GOD or because SCIENCE doesn't change the fact it's a bad idea.

[ian]

I can't go to Stamford Hill without, you know, wanting to pull a bit of facial hair and seeing if those lampshades light up. My wife, more culturally sensitive than I, points out that I shouldn't do this. I think the world would be a better place if God would select his chosen ones through a big hat competition. I love hats so I don't see why a deity wouldn't either. Anyway, there's the NYC variety of orthodox Jewishness, which to be honest, doesn't do much for me in the hat department.

Today's rantage. Those people, if I can call them that, who have to start shoveling stuff into their mouth before they have even paid for it. You know the ones, they lining up at the tills and already carving their way through the shrink-wrap and manhandling food into their steadily masticating jaws. What, like seriously, you're that hungry that you might die if have to wait another minute without foie grassing yourself with a chicken sandwich. Fucking well put that back in your basket and wait to pay for it.

[Mr Larrington]

If big hats are the answer then many a bonkers Third World dictator, and all senior officers of the Red Army, clearly know something I don't.

[ian]

You've got to wonder if they do know something. It's like they've all seen the Rule Book and know that come judgement, it is what's balanced on your head – and not what's in your head – that counts.

[contango]

I can't go to Stamford Hill without, you know, wanting to pull a bit of facial hair and seeing if those lampshades light up. My wife, more culturally sensitive than I, points out that I shouldn't do this. I think the world would be a better place if God would select his chosen ones through a big hat competition. I love hats so I don't see why a deity wouldn't either. Anyway, there's the NYC variety of orthodox Jewishness, which to be honest, doesn't do much for me in the hat department.

Today's rantage. Those people, if I can call them that, who have to start shoveling stuff into their mouth before they have even paid for it. You know the ones, they lining up at the tills and already carving their way through the shrink-wrap and manhandling food into their steadily masticating jaws. What, like seriously, you're that hungry that you might die if have to wait another minute without foie grassing yourself with a chicken sandwich. Fucking well put that back in your basket and wait to pay for it.

It's one thing to start eating something that's got a simple unit price on it. If the packet of sandwiches says 3.99 on it then it's 3.99 whether it's full or empty. But what is the checkout assistant supposed to do with a banana skin when they are priced by weight?

It is pretty lame when people are apparently so hungry they can't wait a couple of minutes to pay for their food before eating it, and also so incompetent they couldn't have gone to the store a few minutes earlier to avoid the problem in the first place.

[hellymedic]

I can't go to Stamford Hill without, you know, wanting to pull a bit of facial hair and seeing if those lampshades light up. My wife, more culturally sensitive than I, points out that I shouldn't do this. I think the world would be a better place if God would select his chosen ones through a big hat competition. I love hats so I don't see why a deity wouldn't either. Anyway, there's the NYC variety of orthodox Jewishness, which to be honest, doesn't do much for me in the hat department.

Today's rantage. Those people, if I can call them that, who have to start shoveling stuff into their mouth before they have even paid for it. You know the ones, they lining up at the tills and already carving their way through the shrink-wrap and manhandling food into their steadily masticating jaws. What, like seriously, you're that hungry that you might die if have to wait another minute without foie grassing yourself with a chicken sandwich. Fucking well put that back in your basket and wait to pay for it.

It's one thing to start eating something that's got a simple unit price on it. If the packet of sandwiches says 3.99 on it then it's 3.99 whether it's full or empty. But what is the checkout assistant supposed to do with a banana skin when they are priced by weight?

It is pretty lame when people are apparently so hungry they can't wait a couple of minutes to pay for their food before eating it, and also so incompetent they couldn't have gone to the store a few minutes earlier to avoid the problem in the first place.

I have to disagree.
When 20 AUKs hit a 24 hour garage at Audax o'clock and there is but one assistant to take money and stamp cards. Time waiting is time wasted and an AUK with plummeting sugar levels might not be a model of courtesy.
The flapjack wrapper will have the same bar code whether the flapjack has been eaten or not.
Best use of time is to eat in the queue, pay in good humour and use the garage's bin.

[ian]

I don't think 1.30pm in the Bromley M&S qualifies for in-queue scoffage. The most exercise these people have is finding a spot in the car park. Until you've paid for it, it's not yours, so leave it be. Poor girl behind the till doesn't want to sort through your crumb-filled post-prandial wreckage to find the bar code.

[L CC]

This rant brought to you from the man with the 1 hour lunch break, not the girl with 30 minutes.

It's my little spit at The Man to eat Food before it's paid for. After all, I do that in every real restaurant, it's only the shit ones that make you pay up front.
Sometimes I 'steal' from other people's trolleys too. Because I can.

[contango]

I can't go to Stamford Hill without, you know, wanting to pull a bit of facial hair and seeing if those lampshades light up. My wife, more culturally sensitive than I, points out that I shouldn't do this. I think the world would be a better place if God would select his chosen ones through a big hat competition. I love hats so I don't see why a deity wouldn't either. Anyway, there's the NYC variety of orthodox Jewishness, which to be honest, doesn't do much for me in the hat department.

Today's rantage. Those people, if I can call them that, who have to start shoveling stuff into their mouth before they have even paid for it. You know the ones, they lining up at the tills and already carving their way through the shrink-wrap and manhandling food into their steadily masticating jaws. What, like seriously, you're that hungry that you might die if have to wait another minute without foie grassing yourself with a chicken sandwich. Fucking well put that back in your basket and wait to pay for it.

It's one thing to start eating something that's got a simple unit price on it. If the packet of sandwiches says 3.99 on it then it's 3.99 whether it's full or empty. But what is the checkout assistant supposed to do with a banana skin when they are priced by weight?

It is pretty lame when people are apparently so hungry they can't wait a couple of minutes to pay for their food before eating it, and also so incompetent they couldn't have gone to the store a few minutes earlier to avoid the problem in the first place.

I have to disagree.
When 20 AUKs hit a 24 hour garage at Audax o'clock and there is but one assistant to take money and stamp cards. Time waiting is time wasted and an AUK with plummeting sugar levels might not be a model of courtesy.
The flapjack wrapper will have the same bar code whether the flapjack has been eaten or not.
Best use of time is to eat in the queue, pay in good humour and use the garage's bin.

I suspect 20 AUKs hitting a 24-hour garage in the middle of the night is a relatively rare phenomenon, when compared to the supermarket at 3 in the afternoon where someone just doesn't feel like waiting.

As you say (and as I also mentioned) something with a simple unit price is easy enough but when you're looking at things sold by weight how is the checkout assistant supposed to know how much the banana once weighed, if all they have to go on is the empty skin?

[contango]

Sometimes I 'steal' from other people's trolleys too. Because I can.

That's a good thought actually. Maybe we could form gangs to take bottles of advocaat out of peoples' trolleys and put them back on the shelves. You know we'd be doing them a favour even if they didn't realise it at the time.

I remember years ago there was some kind of people-watching type of documentary where a supermarket marked a single bottle of whisky down massively - think of dropping something from 29.99 to 9.99 or similar. But there was only one at that price, and it was very clearly marked. The bottle was tracked, and apparently some folks were quite irate when they left their trolley to wander down the aisle only to return and find "their" bottle had been taken. As staff said it isn't their bottle until they paid for it, and someone taking it from their trolley isn't doing anything wrong (issues of manners aside, but bad manners aren't a crime). I think from the point it got taken off the shelf to the point it got paid for it changed hands something like five times.

[Basil]

I've often thought that it might be a good idea to nick a full trolley, to save time in the horrible market.
Closer inspection always puts me off though, as other people's 'big shop' seems to suggest that their evening meal menu for the next week will consist solely of crisps, biscuits and pop, plus loaves of nasty bread.

[contango]

It's truly remarkable to see what people have in a trolley that's piled high.

Mind you when I used to use UK supermarket loyalty schemes I sometimes liked to pick what I bought where based on how badly I could screw up the database profile they were keeping on me.

[contango]

At a local county fair in rural Americaland recently I saw some truly bizarre people. Of course over here being fat is considered a disability, so you see people so fat they can't walk getting around in mobility scooters, which is just as well as there's no way any mortal could be expected to carry the monstrous bags of popcorn and the enormous ice creams they inevitably seem to be eating.

It's hard not to have sympathy when you see someone in a scooter who looks like they are literally wasting away with tubes in their nose to help them breathe. It's harder to have sympathy for the people who are all but spherical yet still insist on eating more of the super-sized portions of fair food (aka junk, aka heart-attack-on-a-stick) as fast as they can.

[ian]

Ah hour for lunch? Nah, considering the mothership still hasn't got around to putting a per diem on my expense account, I consider my entire day merely an extended lunch that starts at breakfast and meanders on till teatime. Such is the hectic life at the coalface of thought leadership.

Supermarket eaters used to upset my mum, as she had sort through their packaging midden for barcodes when she flew a till for Morrison's. She was a harsh critic of people's food choices. Well, food in general, she suffers from an advanced case of food racism and won't touch any foreign food. And I mean, won't touch. She can't apparently even handle a jar of curry sauce without feeling sick. She genuinely once had to go home because someone dropped a jar of korma next to her lane. It may as have well have Sarin nerve gas as far she was concerned. I'm not sure advanced food racism is an ideal skill for a supermarket till pilot. She was also the slowest ever because she had to gab to just about everyone. She's probably the reason they invented self-checkout. Nope, she won't even touch pasta. She'd still not forgiven me for getting married in Paris where no food item was above suspicion and I think she may have subsisted for the entire weekend on a piece of lettuce. Nor has my father, whose aversion to garlic would only be matched by Dracula were it not so apparent that he doesn't actually know what garlic is. He'll read food ingredients with the fervour of a bible-belt Baptist reading scripture, though he's looking for garlic rather than revelation.

You'll probably understand why the only restaurant I went to until the age of 18 was Wimpy. And I had to use the knife and fork.

[Kim]

At a local county fair in rural Americaland recently I saw some truly bizarre people. Of course over here being fat is considered a disability, so you see people so fat they can't walk getting around in mobility scooters

Because people with mobility impairments never put on weight as a result...   

[ian]

On that basis the entire state of Mississippi had a mobility issue.

[contango]

At a local county fair in rural Americaland recently I saw some truly bizarre people. Of course over here being fat is considered a disability, so you see people so fat they can't walk getting around in mobility scooters

Because people with mobility impairments never put on weight as a result...   

I'm sure people with mobility issues do put on weight. Eating ice creams and bags of popcorn bigger than anything I've ever seen before is unlikely to help with the issue.

[Tigerrr]

I have posted on the mobility scooter cycle community fascist tendency before.
When I bought my father a scooter, the salesman explained that warranty extension was not generally required as the average ownership of scooters is about 3 years. They are an end of life thing not a leisure accessory, to inconvenience legitimate healthy pavement and aisle shoppers.
Nobody buys these things for fun. Certainly true in my fathers case. Now he is dead we passed his scooter on to an old folks home and I see an old fat bloke on it from time to time. At least it enables him to get to the shops as I doubt he could walk much with his bloated body, and he obviously isn't all there upstairs.
I tend to find the spectacle of ill informed otherwise right-on fit cyclists pouring prejudicial scorn on others whose actual circumstances they know nothing of other than their weight a bit off-putting.

[ian]

Oh my little furry pawed friend, I think we all appreciate that mobility scooters are an essential mobility aid, and indeed, people do have issues that lead to weight gain and they can certainly conflate. They let the old and infirm enjoy a level of independence that they wouldn't otherwise. I've not been deathed by mobility scooting pavement pigs yet, despite being promised that this very fate awaited me. Gurning grannies with kamikaze intent. Fortunately, my local municipality took steps to prevent this by ensuring there's not enough space left on the pavement for those scooters. Let the infirm stay at home where they're not taking up people's parking. Is it not bad enough that these bloody disabled already get the best parking spaces? I don't see why I should have to park my Q7 two rows away from the supermarket door.

That said, some people do seem to have fallen into the bottomless pit of fries and appear to be trying to eat their way out. I'm not sure that as a society we should keep making the excuses, obesity is something that needs to be addressed, and it can't be with the message that it's all OK and your weight is out of your control on the grounds that it might offend the minority for whom it genuinely isn't. And it's not a case of yelling 'hey fatty' but dealing with it constructively and providing an environment where our health and wellbeing becomes something that we control for ourselves. I think we've lost that. They Americans might have already jumped the shark (or tried and flattened that once frisky selachimorph) on the issue but we could at least try.

[rafletcher]

At a local county fair in rural Americaland recently I saw some truly bizarre people. Of course over here being fat is considered a disability, so you see people so fat they can't walk getting around in mobility scooters

Because people with mobility impairments never put on weight as a result...   

Of course they do. But you have to see to believe some of those in the 'states. In the UK they'd be exceptional (like Tigerrr's example), over there they're normal. Not elderly, not "not all there", not in care homes, just "ordinary folks" who happen to be huge. And it often is over-eating that has given them the weight and mobility issue in the first place. It's a different world.

Ian said it a lot better of course. 

[Cudzoziemiec]

I've often thought that it might be a good idea to nick a full trolley, to save time in the horrible market.
Closer inspection always puts me off though, as other people's 'big shop' seems to suggest that their evening meal menu for the next week will consist solely of crisps, biscuits and pop, plus loaves of nasty bread.

That sounds like my trolley. Well, it's more likely to have beer than pop and a bag of flour than nasty bread, but crisps, biscuits, pizza, ice cream, random shit, yes. I'll already have been to the greengrocer's to buy the fruit and veg, looking at my stupormarket trolley you'd think we never eat anything that's grown.

[Cudzoziemiec]

My first proper girlfriend (you can only have so much impropriety) was Jewish on her father's side (which probably meant she wasn't Jewish, isn't it matrilineal?), but anyway, areligious me got myself dragged along once-upon-a-time to gathering of her more remote orthodox relatives (they have better hats in Finchley, there should be a big orthodox hat league).

Judaism is matrilineal.
Finchley has good hats
Stamford Hill has extreme hats.

Mrs Elswood pickled cucumbers are my usual pickle. Very Kosher!

Our local Stainsbury's has a small 'world food' aisle, which is subdivided into three sections: Asian, Kosher and Polish. The last two feature almost identical foods but with different brand names, a rabbi's certificate and markedly varying prices. I guess rabbis don't give their stamp for free. (And most of the Polish stuff that's not kosher-alike differs only in brand name and price from what's on the standard shelves; a thousand miles of transport doesn't come for free either, but it's harder to see why people insist on paying for it.) I have never seen anyone in there wearing a hat.

[ian]

I am currently eating some beer (IPA) flavour pickles to get me in the mood for pub o'clock. They're very good. Brooklyn Brine apparently, for some reason in M&S. Kosher. I presume there's a lot in Judaism about pickles. God, it would seem, is never without a jar of pickle to snack on. If you're shopping around a religion and you like hats and pickles, it seems the most natural home. Maybe I should start my own religion that's just about hats and pickles, and no other baggage.

Oh and freckles. I like freckles.