A random thread for food things that don't really warrant a thread of their own

[Ham]

Ok, call me childish. I clicked on that and wondered what the result of inputting "bacon" might be. After all, there are veggie variants.

No answers, but an odd "did you mean Jacob?" Ans: no

[hellymedic]

Ok, call me childish. I clicked on that and wondered what the result of inputting "bacon" might be. After all, there are veggie variants.

No answers, but an odd "did you mean Jacob?" Ans: no

When I asked Sainsbury's for haggis, at a time it was not stocked their, website suggested Huggies nappies.

Sainsbury's website is much bigger than isitkosher.uk and haggis IS in stock occasionally...

[ScumOfTheRoad]

Haggis is kosher?

[hellymedic]

Haggis is kosher?

I don't observe kosher rules even if I know them.

It would be possible to make a kosher haggis from scratch and there are 'veggie haggis' products, about which I know little.

[ElyDave]

Passover products are very carefully produced and supervised.

I worked in a factory where we made toothpaste, and we did a special production run for kosher product. A rabbi attended to monitor that all was done correctly.

Unsurprisingly, this extra scrutiny and certification entails additional expenditure so just about ALL products certified Kosher for Passover are very pricy.

We used to call it the Rabbi Tax. Mostly it involves every producer at every stage in the production paying for a Rabbi to check their paperwork. We used to make Kosher Ethyl Butyrate.

Who knew it? I make kosher pickled cucumbers, organic cucumbers and chillies, organic white wine and cider vinegars, plus other herbs and spices.

In the same way that your organically grown vegetables aren't Organic because you're not certified by the Soil Association, your pickles aren't Kosher.

Note, I said organic, not Organic.

My veg are pesticide and herbicide free, and in many cases grown from Organic seed, or organic seed I've saved.

As an aside, egg farmer on our local market told me the reason he was not Organic was due to a shortage of Organic feed in the UK, meaning he'd have had to import from Peru, you can take some things a bit too far

[citoyen]

Well, yeah, "Organic" is a marketing tool, nothing more, nothing less. If you want to make truly ethical choices, you have to make the effort to look beyond the label.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Well, yeah, "Organic" is a marketing tool, nothing more, nothing less. If you want to make truly ethical choices, you have to make the effort to look beyond the label.

Mrs Cudzo has come back from the Polskish shopek with a little bottle of "organic cider vinegar". It's got the EU organic leaf logo and all. So good to support those struggling small farmers (and of course she's a peasant girl herself). Made by McCormick Polska Spzoo...

Actually she won't have paid any attention to that and will have bought it cos she likes it. But that's just her.

[Ham]

Well, yeah, "Organic" is a marketing tool, nothing more, nothing less. If you want to make truly ethical choices, you have to make the effort to look beyond the label.

Not actually arguing, but I'd suggest that choosing organic food should not about ethics as much as it is a health choice. That choice is frequently found cohabiting with "ethical purchasing" but there you are.

[citoyen]

Not actually arguing, but I'd suggest that choosing organic food should not about ethics as much as it is a health choice. That choice is frequently found cohabiting with "ethical purchasing" but there you are.

Whatever the reasons for choosing organic, the same principle applies - that you need to look beyond the label to know exactly what you're paying for. Whether organic food is healthier than non-organic is as open to debate as whether it is more ethical.

The other thing that I guess a lot of people don't realise is that there are different organic certification bodies and each has its own set of rules, some more strict than others... I've not looked into it for a while so I can't claim to know much detail of what organic currently means. The Soil Association always used to be regarded as the best - ie closest to what people imagined they were getting when they bought organic - but even they are essentially still just a marketing organisation.

(Yes, I am deeply cynical about the whole business.)

[Ham]

Not actually arguing, but I'd suggest that choosing organic food should not about ethics as much as it is a health choice. That choice is frequently found cohabiting with "ethical purchasing" but there you are.

Whatever the reasons for choosing organic, the same principle applies - that you need to look beyond the label to know exactly what you're paying for. Whether organic food is healthier than non-organic is as open to debate as whether it is more ethical.

There's actually a simpler reason for choosing "organic" and it's more of a negative thing, than a purist "no chemicals shall touch the temple of my body"* that is, the organic certification - of whatever type - provides some kind of guarantee that it hasn't been subject to the most egregious practices of factory farming. My beef wont have been fattened on hormones, my chickens won't be pumped full of antibiotics, my veg won't have been chlorine washed or whatever (actually that's a given considering I grow most of my own now). If you want to follow that ethos, then organic is a convenient label.


*Just FTR, my body is dedicated to Fat-ima

[ElyDave]

Not actually arguing, but I'd suggest that choosing organic food should not about ethics as much as it is a health choice. That choice is frequently found cohabiting with "ethical purchasing" but there you are.

Whatever the reasons for choosing organic, the same principle applies - that you need to look beyond the label to know exactly what you're paying for. Whether organic food is healthier than non-organic is as open to debate as whether it is more ethical.

There's actually a simpler reason for choosing "organic" and it's more of a negative thing, than a purist "no chemicals shall touch the temple of my body"* that is, the organic certification - of whatever type - provides some kind of guarantee that it hasn't been subject to the most egregious practices of factory farming. My beef wont have been fattened on hormones, my chickens won't be pumped full of antibiotics, my veg won't have been chlorine washed or whatever (actually that's a given considering I grow most of my own now). If you want to follow that ethos, then organic is a convenient label.


*Just FTR, my body is dedicated to Fat-ima

You can have all of those without being "organic", pre COVID I assiduously bought from our farmers market and talked to the farmers about what I was buying, and bought as much as possible as locally as possible. To me this is the key rather than a label of any kind whether "organic", "red tractor" or whatever.

FWIW Organic still allows some quite nasty chemicals to be used

[citoyen]

There's actually a simpler reason for choosing "organic" and it's more of a negative thing, than a purist "no chemicals shall touch the temple of my body"* that is, the organic certification - of whatever type - provides some kind of guarantee that it hasn't been subject to the most egregious practices of factory farming. My beef wont have been fattened on hormones, my chickens won't be pumped full of antibiotics, my veg won't have been chlorine washed or whatever (actually that's a given considering I grow most of my own now). If you want to follow that ethos, then organic is a convenient label.

This "some kind of guarantee" is very much dependent on the precise rules applied by the relevant certifying body. You might be unpleasantly surprised at what farming practices are allowed by some of them.

Hormone-treating and chlorine-washing are totally banned for all beef and chicken in the UK, organic or not. Of course, that might change as part of any UK-US trade agreement post-Brexit but it still applies for the time being.

[ian]

Truth is, though, that we couldn't feed the world 'organically' so it's a bit of a first-world sop.

[Mr Larrington]

Since the Tier wossname started my local Mr Sainsbury’s House of Toothy Comestibles has once again stopped selling one-pint containers of their own-brand milk, so it's either buy a two-pint one and pour half of it down the sink every Monday evening^* or buy Grahams.  This week they'd sold out of Grahams regular semi-skilled, so I had to buy the Organic version.  Does it make my tea taste better?  No.  No, it does not.  And given the approximately one-pint mug of tea it gets put in also contains two spoons of inorganic sugar and is drunk with a side order of inorganic choklit biscuits, the health benefits are likely to be more marginal than any gains sought by SD Brailsford.

There may have been a point to all this but it’s now slipped my mind.

* Yes, I could buy two pints of Mr Sainsbury’s moo juice, decant one pint into another container and freeze it, but then I'd only forget to defrost it and have no milk for my tea, and get maudlin and start doing Strong Drink, Class As or far-right politics as a crutch.  And no-one wants that.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Black tea is the answer. Or start knitting your own yogurt.

[Ham]

You can have all of those without being "organic",
....
FWIW Organic still allows some quite nasty chemicals to be used

Well, yes. I was just highlighting that organic was a convenient label that near-guarantees you won't be subjected to the worst practices, even before they are known to be wurst. (have you seen what goes into those? ? ?)

Hormone-treating and chlorine-washing are totally banned for all beef and chicken in the UK, organic or not. Of course, that might change as part of any UK-US trade agreement post-Brexit but it still applies for the time being.

Growth hormone hasn't always been banned, my interest in the subject and awareness of organic predates the ban. What might the next "growth hormone" issue be? I'd rather not be a £1.05-pig. Chlorine treatment is only banned for meat, not for veg, which is why I used it in that respect.

[citoyen]

Growth hormone hasn't always been banned, my interest in the subject and awareness of organic predates the ban. What might the next "growth hormone" issue be? I'd rather not be a £1.05-pig. Chlorine treatment is only banned for meat, not for veg, which is why I used it in that respect.

You're obviously better informed than I was giving you credit for. 

Not everyone is fully up to speed on what organic actually means though.

[ian]

The EU directive to ban growth hormones came in back in 1981. Importation of hormone-fed meat was, however, allowed until 1989. There are plenty of other 'growth promoters' such as ractopamine and broad-spectrum antibiotics (madness!) which have also been banned (even China has now banned antibiotic growth promoters, but there are all kinds of 'veterinary exemptions).

Generally, these practices are, of course, symbolic of poor, intensive conditions. Industrial cattle conditions in the US are, simply put, horrific. Chlorine washing meat won't hurt you, it's the reason they need to do so that might.

I'm minded that the best thing we can do for the environment is to eat less meat.

[L CC]

But it's so tasty!

[ian]

I'm mulling over going vegetarian again (I was for over a decade). My wife is less keen on this as I do all the cooking.

I do put significant effort into only eating animals so happy they practically volunteer to be on my menu.

[Ham]

You're obviously better informed than I was giving you credit for. 

The reason for why, is that (pre-81) I had occasion to nurse my mother, who had terminal cancer. As part of that, we experimented with what I can only call a quack therapy which among other things demanded 100% organic diet. Organic food at the time was HARD to find, and researching what was needed and what was implied involved more than searching the (non-existent) Internet. My interest in the subject has remained; I'm not arguing with any of your observations.

Not everyone is fully up to speed on what organic actually means though.

No shit. "They" almost never are. There's an interesting parallel with the kosher question, there is as poor understanding of the term "Glatt Kosher" as there is organic. Glatt Kosher is used by almost as a term connoting super-kosher (because everyone knows the harder you make something the betterer it is), whereas it actually just refers to a subset of slaughtered meat.

Anyone interested in the detail? here you are

(click to show/hide)

Kosher slaughtering, for all the current questions around the humanity of the act, for all of history up to modern day it embedded concepts of animal welfare. For example, one animal may not be slaughtered in front of another. Any animal that has been badly treated (broken bones, lesions) is not kosher. Post slaughter, the internal organs are examined for defects and can render the carcass non-kosher. Glatt kosher is a specific type of lesion on the lungs that are judged one way (for kosher) and another way for glatt kosher.

I doubt that more than 1% that use the term know that.

[hellymedic]

I think my sister and her ilk are amongst those who go Glatt.

Her husband is a Rabbi, who has learned various Cutting Skilz so I presume they would know that.

[Ham]

He would, she less certainly.

[ian]

If a Jew eats something non-kosher do they explode like staked or garlic-seasoned vampires? I sat out school RE as a conscientious objector so apologies if I missed this.

[hellymedic]

Did you watch Ed Miliband eating a bacon sandwich?
What do yo think happened?
What has happened to Ham after his barbecues?