Fat Kids, and Good Old Jamie - Published in the South Shropshire Journal 31/5/13

Jamie Oliver – gawd bless ‘im – having already socked it to The Man on school dinners, has got in a right two and eight about over what goes into our children’s lunchboxes. The contents of many he reckons, are tantamount to child abuse. He’s recently had a full-on bust up with Education Secretary Michael Gove over this, but Jamie perpetually ploughs on.

I’m pretty sure it’s not in Jamie’s job-spec to do this sort of stuff, but very few others are doing it, so he takes one for the team. Along with a chap I know called Henry Dimbleby who has a super chain of healthy fast food restaurants called Leon (Shropshire’s crying out for one), there just aren’t many high-profile people with the single-mindedness to take a gargantuan task like this on. Bloody well bravo and chin-chin for fellows like that I say.

It’s far too easy to bash the likes of Oliver as just another celebrity chef, but I’ll defend him until the day is done. There has been no single human being on the planet in the last half-century who has done more to make us celebrate the good things - and decry the bad - in food than Jamie Oliver.

Being complacent that your kids eat junk in lunches provided by their school is just about forgivable. But only just. Out of sight, out of mind. It’s slightly beyond your control, but packing their lunchboxes with nutritionally vacuous crud is reprehensible. The government can’t immediately control this bit, nor can Jamie Oliver, but a culture of bad food sets-in like rot and spreads. It comes from the Mums and Dads who allow their offspring to eat Haribo and Pringles for breakfast.

An industry source tells me, “Home economics as a subject in schools was abandoned when food became part of design technology. Food technology consists of things like ‘design a pizza and design the packaging then explain how you would sell it’. It’s all to do with commercial food production rather than scratch-cooking with proper ingredients.”

This could be happening in your local schools – perhaps it’s worth digging a little deeper?

At some point, when they’re a bit bigger our kids will hide away and smoke cigs, drink bad cider, and learn about the birds and the bees first hand. They’ll decide what goes in their lunch too, and we’ll take it on the chin, like grown-ups. But we must give them a foundation while they’re little and their vital organs untainted by vice.

As parents, we have a singular and ineffable duty to keep our children safe from harm.

Listen to Jamie, and you may find he’s not the wally that you thought he was. He’s just a bloke trying to do his best. And what’s so wrong with that?

Pigeons and Big Openings - Published in the South Shropshire Journal 17/5/13

May bank holiday in South Shropshire and it sounds like the whole county is a-buzz with the hum of electric mowers. The drone dips and circles on the warm breeze like the swallows that have decided finally to come back to Blighty for the summer.

I forego the mower, lured instead by my small vegetable patch where seeds that have lain dormant and shivering for weeks are now poking shoots from the warming soil. Not being a natural gardener, I cherish and guard this plot with perhaps greater zeal than I afford my own children. So when the woodpigeon have started hungrily to eye my nascent pea-shoots, and then start pecking at them I know what needs to be done.

The old air rifle often makes an appearance at this time of year, the barrel warm in my hand, elbow rested on top of the wheelie bin by the back door I take a sight on an intruder on the pea bed. A ping, and a thrup, the briefest of flaps: Pigeon 0 – Peas 1. An hour later and the same again, and I’ve got dinner for two. If you’re going to go to the bother of slaying something that’s dissing your veggies then you might as well eat it. I fry the pigeons’ plumptious breasts in butter and wilt a clump of roadside wild garlic (well washed – it’s at leg cocking level) in the same pan. Free food of the very highest order.

I love a Big Opening almost as much as my patch; the bigger the better for me. I’ve been to a couple recently and it’s heartening to see that there’s a long-lacked gastronomic middle ground in and around Ludlow that’s being filled.

I went to opening night – technically a Soft rather than Big Opening, I’ll take what I can get - at Ludlow Kitchen in Bromfield (yeah, yeah, it’s a very minor geographic detail). Tremendous stuff: all field to fork and spot-on sourcing credentials, tasty prices, a non-sweary and modestly brilliant chef. Then I went to the Marches Kitchen & Bar where there used to be a sweaty dive called the George, in Ludlow’s Castle Square. They do slightly bonkers pizzas, brunches, cocktails. The staff were pretty and made eye contact. Unusual for Ludlow but a great formula. They source ingredients locally. I wish them all very well.

Up until recently there’s not been many places (apart from lovely ol’ Clive Davis at the Green Café) round here where you can go to eat without feeling guilty about it. The hospitality industry is finally catching onto the fact that we’re all sailing quite close to the wind. So if you’re not shooting your scoff or picking it from the gutter, you can at least go out for something nice to eat without taking too much of a hit.

Dog Poo & The Ludlow Spring Festival - Published in the South Shropshire Journal 10/5/13

By the time you read this, the local elections will have been and gone. Quite honestly I’ve lost interest. If there’s something guaranteed to turn you off local politics, it’s following local politicians on Twitter. The hair pulling and tit-for-tat that goes on between wannabe (and indeed existing) councillors on this so-called social networking website, has been anything but sociable. What’s the big fuss anyway? Once they’re in they will spend the next five years arguing about dog muck and who’s supposed to mow the grass in the cemetery. Important stuff granted, but come on girls, play nicely.

So, if the new guard hasn’t taken control of the South Shropshire Journal you will have read the first bit of this column, and if you live in Ludlow or its environs (or anywhere else for that matter) you can look forward to this town putting on a socking great party that celebrates victuals and grog. The Ludlow Spring Food Festival is like the sexy but demure sister of the big September event. Both equally luscious in their own way, but the spring one for me has the edge.

The Spring Event has a big old beardy beer tent and here Shropshire does its thing better than anyone else in the world. We are a county of understatement and quiet plodding, but we brew beer like nobody else. The sausages, the bread, the E-type Jags and Alvises (the Marches Transport Festival runs concurrently in the castle grounds) and a bit of iffy folk music is just so very British. And it takes place in May, the most splendid, verdant British month. A big hug of a festival that shows off what we do best in this not-so-quiet corner of England. And it makes me jolly proud to be a Shropshire Lad. 

Whilst Ludlow’s gastronomic crown may have slipped and slided around on her head over the years, it’s these weekend-long jollies that keep her steady. Michelin stars come and go, but the festivals make life gastronomically and socially sound in this town. The May Fair last weekend will no doubt have attracted it’s usual tedious dose of NIMBYism from Disgusted of Ludlow; “The helter-skelter was virtually in the upstairs drawing room, simply ghastly. And the smell of fried onions, uugh.” but actually, it all adds to the fun of living in a market town.

Festivals and fairs make places tick, whether you like them or not. Communities come together and celebrate the good things - bangers or candyfloss- and others flock in from afar and point out the things that we as natives take for granted: low house prices, friendly smiles from strangers, quirky independent shops, omnipresent dog poo, untended graveyards…We live in a good place. Let’s enjoy it. 

Food Waste and Bare Naked Laziness - South Shropshire Journal (3/5/13)

You’ve probably gathered by now, that I’m not that hot on in-depth research. That’s what proper journalists do. Researching. And whilst I suppose I am a proper journalist (I write stuff in a newspaper, ergo I’m a proper journalist), I don’t consider myself as such. So gathering facts and quotes and general noteworthy hunks of journalistic hardcore is just not something I do. Let’s be honest, I’m lazy. Naked industry simply doesn’t number itself in my arsenal of attributes.

But, in a convenient Muhammad-meeting-the-mountain fashion, some research came to me a few days ago by way of a press release from goodtoknow.co.uk which is apparently a women’s lifestyle website offering “practical tips and advice for busy mums…” It may not be a real website, I haven’t been bothered to find out but they threw some interesting nuggets in my direction which apparently they’d pinched from the Office of National Statistics. The general gist being thus:

Food prices have risen by 12% in the last five years; over the same period household income has dropped by 12%; consumer spending on food has increased by 3.5%; and the average UK household chucks out £480’s worth of food annually, 61% of which is avoidable.

Bone-idleness aside, this is why I don’t do much research, because the results are generally terribly boring (see above). We have a Ministry of Sums to do statistics for us. Not proper journalists.

But let’s go with it, because now more than ever this is a Really Big Issue and wherever these figures came from, we know what the situation is and it’s bloody scary. Thoughtlessly hurling food in the bin is an utterly heinous thing to do, whether you can afford it or not. We all know that the cost of eating has risen scarily over the last few years, the reasons being too numerous to discuss in the 150 odd words I have left today. As a species, we simply cannot ignore the impact that the desire to fill our bellies is having on our tremulous little planet, and all who live on it.

By unnecessarily wasting food, we’re waving two fingers at so much. And it’s odd because most of us are either of - or only a hop, skip and a jump away from – a time when food was respected and cherished. If this is some sort of a backlash, then we need to stop it.

Food retailers deploy use by dates to cover their backs, not to save our guts. Use your nose and taste buds, and your common sense. Buy only what you need and get inventive in the kitchen.

In this topsy-turvy world there are many things that we can’t control, but not filling up wheelie bins with perfectly good scoff is one that we can. There’s no time to waste.

Polythene and Purple Tips: South Shropshire Journal (unedited) 26/4/13

It’s been killing me over the last few weeks not mentioning it because it’s such a yawningly obvious subject. Everyone else has been carping on about it literally forever, but being the razor-sharp gastrohack that I am (“Wow!” my half-dozen readers are frequently heard to exclaim, “Mackley’s surprised us again with his off-the-dial outré opinions. Such a maverick”) I’ve been original enough not to have had to scrape the barrel, for want of a less original cliché. 

But hang it. It was St George’s Day on Tuesday, and I’m an Englishman so this week I’m going to kick off with the weather. Not in a whiney way, because if there’s anything that an Englishman is better at doing than talking about the weather, it’s whining. Boring. Pull your pants up, crack on, and cry God for Harry, England and Saint George.

Anyway, the weather hasn’t been altogether the loveliest, which has meant that spring is late. Not just turn up for dinner at 7.30 and arrive at 8.00 late, but send a text the next day to say that Strictly was on and you couldn’t be bothered late. I’m not whining but... For some farmers, horticulturalists and the like spring’s rudeness is potentially livelihood threatening. For gluttons, it’s irksome.

So thank goodness half of bucolic England is wrapped in sturdy polythene! I tell you, this stuff is amazing. Sod the aesthetics: over the last few days I’ve been snarfing properly, slap you in the face stunning tomatoes from Worcestershire; proud purple-tipped asparagus from the Wye Valley (eye-wateringly expensive but a nice alternative to a pack of fags); tinky-winky, nutty little spuds from Jersey. This is British produce at its almost-very-best and it’s worth every penny.

How wonderful that humans have the ingenuity to cheat the weather and to coax tasty edible plants into thinking that it’s nice and hot, when in fact it’s not. We’re just about to emerge from the “hungry gap” (the time of year when pre-imports, winter stores had run dry and ye olde veggie patch was still snoozing), but until the weather perks up a bit, embrace the moist and fertile warmth of the English polytunnel. 

Incidentally, this is the one time of year when I throw caution to my carbon footprint and go potty for foreign imports. Pakistani Alfonso mangos, Sicilian blood oranges etc are so very tasty. Sorry, I momentarily forgot about the polar bears. Oopsie.

Lambs unfortunately cannot be reared under plastic, and the harsh early spring weather tragically killed off thousands of them. Give British mutton and hogget a go instead (you won’t regret it), and if your local butcher or supermarket won’t stock it, keep pestering until they do. If they refuse to, go to someone who will. My dear half-dozen readers, you have much responsibility on  your shoulders. 

Pollocks, shanks, Labradors (unedited): South Shropshire Journal 19/4/13

Following on from last week’s bit about the Austerity Food Revolution and all that sustainability jazz, I turned my mind to food fads. Now, depending on what paper you read (and if it’s just the South Shropshire Journal, it’s okay but you need to broaden your horizons just a teeny-weeny bit) or watch on the telly, you may well be aware that food faddism and sustainability go hand in hand.

It’s like the horsemeat thing again. Recently the National Federation of Fish Friers reported that some of their more unscrupulous peers were palming-off totally unsustainable cod and haddock as the hipster uber-faddish and seafloor friendly pollock and whiting.  So there’s a chance, albeit a small one, that the last time you went down the chippie for cods, they gave you a load of old pollocks instead.

In some places, namely east London and every twee gastropub in the Cotswolds (invariably run by a sacked banker called Hugo and his Labrador), people actually demand pollock, whiting and even nasty old coley because apparently they’re just as tasty as cod and haddock. This is without doubt, utter nonsense. Give me a blind tasting, and I’ll tell you what I’d rather share my chips with.

Fads of course lead to other more tasty sustainability issues. The lamb shank thing of the early noughties for instance: tremendous, lovely cheap bits of sheep, braise ‘em in red wine for three weeks or get M&S to do it for you. The problem was, there weren’t enough sheep for shanks so they had to come from New Zealand, and then the British ones got expensive.

I’m no economist, but I think they call it supply and demand. Demand goes up, supply goes down, price goes up. It’s happened to poor old pork belly, ham hocks, beetroot and rhubarb (I kid you not). Food, like everything else is subject to trends. So while we’ve all been looking at those cheaper cuts of meat, licking our lips and getting change from a fiver – it won’t last. Although it will in Shropshire, for a little while at least, because we’re a little slower to catch on. 

My pal John at the Ludlow Food Centre does a cut of beef called onglet. Onglet dangles off the diaphragm of a cow and it is ferrous, visceral, and deeply bovine. It’s the best bit of steak you’ll ever cook, except that you won’t because nobody knows about it apart from John and me so I get it dead cheap. On a recent trip to London I saw some on a butcher’s slab in the wonderful Ginger Pig in Marylebone. Demand must be high for knobbly cow-bits in the Smoke, because a pound of this would have bought you a five-bed house in Shropshire. It’s a funny, faddy old world. 

Austerity Foodie Revolution (unedited): South Shropshire Journal 12/413

We know what happened when Lehman Brothers went kaput in 2008: They all went tumbling down and took the rest of them too. MPs, coppers, journos, the lot. All in a oner. Five years later you can’t pay a cheque in over the counter without cocking a snook at the teller behind the Plexiglas. Who can you trust?

They owe us big time those bunch of bankers, but on the plus side we got the Austerity Foodie Revolution (AFR). The AFR digs for victory, makes do and mends, keeps calm and carries on, just like Granny and Gramps had to in the war. But they actually had to because their house had been smashed to bits by the Luftwaffe and they were properly, old-fashioned skint and scared. If they didn’t turn their dahlias over to mangolds the war-ag would’ve had them in front of the firing squad, and their daughters handed over to Yank airmen.

For us however, the AFR means that we can go back to a time when Englishers wore smocks and big hats and didn’t have a care in the world (apart from bad teeth, high infant mortality rates, and the death penalty for apple scrumpin’). The 2013 AFR is biodynamic pigs in your garden to save money on lard, growing potatoes in old tyres (Sustainability? Check!) and buying eggs from the bloke who actually laid them at the farmers’ market.

The AFR makes people more aware of how they spend their money, what they spend it on, and who the profit goes to. This is tremendously commendable, but the poor kids are still eating rubbish.

Marie Antoinette had Le Petit Hameau - a mock-up farmstead - built in the grounds of the palace of La Versailles. There she could play the shepherdess and hang out with agricultural types whilst the proles starved on the other side of the palace fence. SUCH FUN!

I’m just saying.

So, the Austerity Foodie Revolutionists would love to tell you that this isn’t a class thing, and they may be right. Fred down the road grows his own tomatoes, and Iris next door takes a half pound of tripe from the butcher every week – and they’re as working class as Cheryl Cole. But there’s a skipped generation. Could it be that the here-and-now children who don’t care about what they eat have parents who don’t care about what they eat? How is it that the old-fashioned ways of growing, rearing, and buying food have become whimsy for the moneyed and utterly uninteresting for those without?

A lot of the fluffy stuff sought by the AFR is unattainable, and in global terms unsustainable. But much of it isn’t. Food for thought? After all, that’s why I’m here.