Badgers and Cheese (pre-editing) - Published in the South Shropshire Journal 21/6/13

The Great British Badger Bash is underway down in the West Country. It’s too early to work out if it’s going well (“well” being an entirely objective term depending on whether you’re a badger or not) but unsurprisingly it’s already causing a hoo-hah.

I’ve read the pros and cons of this operation and perhaps it’s not really in my remit to delve too deep into this, but as a fully paid-up and dedicated cheesemonger it’s of frontline relevance to me. Like any dedicated cheeseman ought to, I deal with many of my suppliers directly. Many - arguably often some of the best - cheesemakers are dairy farmers. The impression I get is that bovine tuberculosis is a massive pain in the what-nots, and that old Mr Badger is far from an innocent bystander when it comes the spreading of this disease.

Now we all know that badgers have been being bashed by farmers since BTB began. You’ll never find anyone who’s actually done it, but everyone knows somebody who has. Let’s get real here, how many people have really hit a badger with their car? And how many badgers do you find “sleeping” (as I frequently lie to my daughter) by the side of the road? Quite. We may as well make it legal for a bit and see what happens.

So it’ll be interesting to see how this cull works out. In time the figures will speak for themselves. Until they do, I wish that people would get their heads around the fact that the countryside and its goings-on are not always pretty and fluffy. Nature does not organise itself, and because we’re at the top of the food chain and considerably more intelligent than badgers and dairy cattle, we need to get involved. Unless of course you’d rather not eat meat, vegetables and fruit, or drink milk, wear woolly jumpers and so on.

I need to sell good cheese in order to make a living, so I could do without badgers buggering things about. And good cheese, properly made by people who care, is quite the most remarkable thing. Possibly more messed around with over the years than lovely old bread that I extolled last week, by the early ‘80s artisan cheesemaking had all but died out in the UK, but now, and especially in our neighbouring counties and our own, craft (not Kraft) cheese production is thriving.

The work of the artisan chessemaker is so incredibly skilled. There’s science there, but more than anything else there’s the intrinsic instinct and ‘feel’ that comes with passion and experience. When tasting proper cheese you’ll get a sense of place – what the Frogs call terroir – of where the cows grazed, what the weather was doing, and what the milkmaid was wearing. Really, you will, and I don’t want those pesky badgers getting in the way of something as gastronomically glorious as that. 

The Love of the Loaf - Published in the South Shropshire Journal 14/6/13

A few weeks ago I – perhaps slightly acerbically – took a bit of a pop at the New Foodie Revolutionists. All beards, trust funds and yeastiness, they’ve got a long way to go when it comes to having a grip on reality and commercialism, sustainability and feeding the world. But they mean well, really they do, and they reap harmony from the baking of real bread.

Have you ever baked a loaf of bread? Of course you have. Scratch that. Have you ever baked a proper loaf of bread? A loaf that is made from nothing but flour, water and microbes and LOVE?

Real Bread amongst the foodists of San Francisco and London is pretty much the status quo, but for the rest of us, not so much. It used to be the norm, but no longer. It ought to be though, because properly made bread is an embodiment of everything that is meet and right, so to do. It is an outwardly simple yet intrinsically mind-boggling thing. Like bread, many of the finest and most brilliant things contain very little. Think cheese, wine, beer, salami and Wayne Rooney.

Bread, like booze and cheese is the most ancient and wondrous of comestibles. Bread is warm, it is sharing, it is family, and it transcends everything. There is no single culture on earth that doesn’t make, break, and share bread.

My mate Peter who’s The Man at Price’s in Ludlow gave me some of his ancient sourdough starter a little while ago. Sourdough is where it’s at when it comes to bread and you need Starter to start it. Food is subject to trends just like clothes. Take your Aztec-prints– so last year, like quasi-modish tiger bread and foccacia-with-stuff-in-it. Faintly daft now. Looks like fun, not much to it, and will never make the distance. The good sourdough loaf is the well-judged A-line skirt, a Loake’s boot, a Panama hat. It will go on and on.

Anyway, I’ve been playing around with Peter’s starter (a mad amalgam of natural yeasts, which feed from the atmosphere they live in) for yonks. It’s taken a lot of work, but I’ve finally nailed it and this week I a made a damned-near perfect loaf. The most satisfying (publishable) thing I’ve done in ages.

It’s fun to have a bash at this at home, but if you can’t be fagged and you live where I do then why bother? We have a plethora of brilliant bakers on our doorstep. Peter at Prices, Robert at Swifts, Anna at the Ludlow Food Centre, and many more. The phenomenal artisan bakers of Shropshire may not be in the trendy-set yet, but we’re bloody lucky to have them in our bucolic back yard.

The Shropshire Map of Death

Frankly I find it utterly stultifying that the government, after everything that has happened over the last few gruesome years, is still pumping (or surreptitiously slipping) cash into quangos. Big dozy white elephants implemented to make it look like actual governmental departments are doing something productive. But they’re still there, being all serious and expensive.

Public Health England (“an Executive Agency for the Department of Health”) has carried out a project called Longer Lives. Part of the Longer Lives project was to draw up a map – presumably done by a bunch of GCSE geography kids on work experience – to highlight the fact that people in the southern half of England live longer than those in the northern half.

I haven’t found out how long it took PHE to work out that folk up north smoke more fags, eat more takeaways, and go out on the lash more often than the fairies down south, but I’ll bet it took them a fair while. Maybe Jeremy Hunt was on holiday that week. I could have saved them a whole bunch of time and just told it to them straight, but strangely I wasn’t approached to opine on this particular matter. Hey-ho. The interesting thing though is that whereas the north south divide was always traditionally a diagonal line from the Severn Estuary to the Wash, it is now a nice horizontal-ish line from the Humber to the Mersey. Much more north south and them-and-us. Result for Shropshire: as far as death goes, we’re southerners. Yay!

It’s great. You can have a look at a pretty colour coded map on the PHE website. Green meaning premature death outcomes are “best”, yellow, orange and down to red. Red being...you get the idea. So there I was looking at this map, most of the southern half nice and green with odd pockets of red here and there in places like Luton, Coventry and so on, and as my eyes moved upwards and across I was thrilled to see Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Shropshire all verdant, free of junk-food, lung cancer and untimely death and feeling really quite proud to be a man of the Marches and then…then there was this bloody great red blob pulsing like a bubo in the top right corner of my home county.

Telford and Wrekin. As red as you like. After Much Wenlock, you’ve pretty much had it. To be honest it’s of no great concern to me, as callous as this may sound. My own Shropshire stops at about Church Stretton, but it just makes our county’s Fat Map look untidy. A blot (or a Blott – RIP dear old Tom Sharpe – nice Shropshire cultural reference there young man, thanks very much) on our lovely and aged landscape. 

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.