Food

The vast majority of the UK’s essential foods, including cereals, potatoes, sugar and oil, are grown in areas of England rated as having a moderate to very high risk of drought.

A very high proportion – 81% – of England’s fresh produce is concentrated in parts of the country that are already experiencing water stress, according to the analysis by the nature-focused investment fund Rebalance Earth.

Three-quarters of England’s wheat (77%), barley (75%) and oilseed rape (74%) grow in parts of the country rated as being at a moderate to very high drought risk, along with 70% of sugar beet and 67% of potatoes, it found.

And?

You do not grow wheat in a swamp. You have never grown wheat in a swamp. Wheat is a dryland crop. Or, at least, drier land than a swamp. Thus wheat has always been grown on land more at risk of drought than things grown in swamps.

And?

What remains of my geography O Level seems to be reminding me that it’s the eastern – drier – part of England which does more of the wheat growing while the west does more of the dairy – reliant upon that wet living green grass. No?

Though UK farmers produce sufficient quantities of staple foods such as meat, milk, eggs and wheat to meet most domestic demand, the country relies heavily on overseas growers for vegetables and fruit – imported fruit makes up more than 80% of supply.

So, roughly speaking, we already do what the Greenie campaigners insist we should. Grow what we can grow here here and import the things that cannot be grown here. So, that’s settled then.

At the start of the film, there is no guilt in Gilligan’s pleasure walking into a chicken shop (“Bring on the wings!”). Growing up in a low-income household in London, a bucket of KFC was a family treat. He’s even done voiceover work for a Nando’s advert; “It’s just chickens, right?”. What works so well in the film is that Gilligan’s shock as he digs deeper into the industry doesn’t look manufactured for the camera. The UK rears one billion chickens a year and, in Lincolnshire, Gilligan meets animal welfare activists in balaclavas (“This is like Call of Duty. I’m scared!”). He learns about the environmental harm to rivers that chicken farming causes, and explores racist ideas around black people and fried chicken.

Fair enough. No one will learn these things unless they’re told them, obviously.

Gilligan speaks to a psychologist who explains how ultra-processed foods hook us, making us feel great – and then comes the crash. You can see the difference in Gilligan, who is lethargic and grumpy. It might not kill him, but his chicken diet is doing harm.

The obvious objection to all this is that of course you’re not meant to eat fried chicken every day. But, as he finds out, half the calories in people’s diets in the UK come from ultra-processed foods

Ultra-processed? Fried chicken? Whut?

This is fried chicken is bad, u-p is bad, therefore f c is u-p, right? Which is bad logic let alone bad observation or classification.

I have been trying to eat fewer ultra-processed foods with my family for five years, and it has been challenging.

Many experts agree that ultra-processed foods (UPF) pose health risks

They’re all lying to you. It’s a grift.

Anyway, the advice becomes learn to cook, frozen and canned veggies tend to be better than out of season fresh, in sean fresh better than any and, well, that’s about it. So the advice that follows from the grift isn’t all that bad…..

Layla Moran, the committee’s chair and a Liberal Democrat MP, highlighted the widespread advertising and availability of unhealthy food, and urged ministers to take strong action

We’ve only just solved humanity’s most basic problem – do we have enough food? – and now you want to ban the stuff?

Being a carnivore is often seen as an expression of manhood, but the need has never been greater for men to cut down their intake

Too easy, innit?

Overall, there’s a persistent theme: many men see meat eating as an expression of manhood, and view attempts to force change to their diets as a personal – even emasculating – threat.

This likely stems, Camilleri says, from longstanding cultural and symbolic associations – the myths that meat is masculine and plants are feminine; that men are hunters, women gatherers; that real men eat meat.

But as the planet heats up, the need has never been greater for men, and the men in our lives, to shake up meal time.

This is in the Australia section. That mental image of the ocker isn’t quite true these days – noodle armed soyboys rather…..

Those anxieties lie at the heart of Taiwan Travelogue, the first book originally written in Mandarin to win the £50,000 prize. Presented as the translation of a rediscovered travel memoir from 1938, the novel follows Aoyama, a Japanese novelist with a “monstrous appetite” touring Taiwan on a government-sponsored culinary trip. There she meets an enigmatic Taiwanese interpreter, Chizuru, with whom she becomes infatuated. Each chapter is named after a Taiwanese delicacy – braised minced pork, sliced raw fish, melon tea – creating a synaesthesia of taste, texture and longing.

Taiwan is where the old, courtly, Chinese cooking still survives. Come the revolution all the top chefs followed the Nationalists.

Sure, sure, the regional cookings of China (much closer to the variety in “European” cooking than within any one European country) still exist there. But that courtly, aristocratic, stuff, in Taiwan now.

So I’ve heard…..

“Miss Owen had followed a vegan diet from 2016 stemming from her environmental concerns,” Ms Gray said. “Investigations were carried out to determine whether Miss Owen may have had a Vitamin B12 deficiency as a result of her vegan diet and whether, if that was the case, a Vitamin B12 deficiency could have caused her to have psychiatric manifestations in the period before her death.”
The deceased’s blood tests, analysed by three experts, were found to be “consistent with Vitamin B12 deficiency” and that “this likely resulted from Miss Owen’s vegan diet,” the coroner added.
Miss Owen had left a final note providing evidence of a possible mental illness, the coroner said.

This is B12, not B1 like the Japanese and Navy Curry. But still the perils of a purely vegan diet….

Ms Gray concluded that Miss Owen died “whilst on the balance of probabilities suffering delusional beliefs brought about by a Vitamin B12 deficiency developed as a direct result of her vegan diet.”

Sigh.

OK, so it’s a tradition, every Friday lunchtime in the Japanese Navy – curry.

Despite its south Asian origins, it’s no exaggeration to describe curry as Japan’s de facto national dish: a soupy, mild version beloved of schoolchildren and office workers, and generations of SDF personnel for whom kaigun kare – or navy curry – is a source of fierce pride as well as sustenance.

It’s deffo via us English. Deffo. But this, I wonder:

As Japan expanded its influence in Asia in the late 1800s, large numbers of soldiers fell ill or died from beriberi, a vitamin B1 deficiency linked to their diet, which largely comprised plain white rice.

The solution came in the form of curry powder thought to have been introduced by Anglo-Indian officers in the Royal Navy who were among the first westerners to come into contact with Japan after Commodore Perry’s “black ships” forced it to end centuries of sakoku “locked country” isolation in the 1850s.

Curry powder, it turned out, contained enough vitamin B1 to keep soldiers and sailors healthy. Beriberi cases plummeted, and military personnel quickly developed a taste for anglicised curry and rice, made with meat and vegetables and a flour-thickened sauce that was less likely to splash around in rough seas.

I knew about the beri-beri and polished white rice. But curry powder contains enough? Rilly? Or is it whatever else is put in with it?

Want to reduce your intake of ultra-processed food? If so, cook at home more often, don’t eat late at night and chew your food more slowly.

Those are among some of the tips doctors have offered to help people limit the amount of UPF they consume given the acute and growing danger it poses to human health worldwide.

They demand that we stop enjoying one of the grand feats of capitalism. Excellent tasty food available for a – comparative – pittance. Also, that the wimmins git back into the kitchen. Can’t have people enjoying themsleves, with actual leisure time now, can we?

Given that the definition of UPF seems to be centering on anything produced for profit that’s the driving force here. Git back to 8 hours a day in the kitchen, wimmins. Freedom, choice, you’ve ‘ad yer lot.

Fruit could be stripped from yogurts under Labour’s “counter-intuitive” junk food crackdown, manufacturers have warned.

Food giants such as Danone are understood to be concerned that new rules on sugar and nutrition may force manufacturers to rethink recipes or even withdraw perfectly healthy products from supermarket shelves altogether.

Under the plans, health officials want to update the UK Nutrient Profiling Model (NPM) to include so-called “free sugars” that are released from fruit and vegetables when they are mashed or pureed.

It means plain yogurt would be deemed healthy, but the exact same product with added fruit could be deemed “unhealthy” – despite containing additional fibre and nutrients.

Just mad.

A small amount of insect contamination is practically unavoidable in the fruit and veg chain. In the US, there is precise guidance on how many “fragments”, and of what, are allowed in food, which makes for stomach-churning reading. US consumers may have to put up with 30 insect fragments per 100g of peanut butter, 60 fragments per 100g of chocolate, 225 per 225g of pasta, two maggots per 100g of tomato paste, one maggot per 250ml of citrus juice and up to 35 fruit fly eggs in one cup of raisins. Fortunately, the rules are tighter here. “Food placed on the market must be free from visible insect contamination … there are no permitted tolerance levels for insect fragments,” says a spokesperson for the Food Standards Agency (FSA). “While minor, unavoidable contamination can occur in natural products, visible contamination, or anything that could compromise safety or quality, will generally trigger enforcement action.”

Glory Be! Our regulations are tighter.

Well, no, they’ve just not as specific. Instead of saying two – well mushed – maggots per 100g we say not enough to compromise safety or to be seen. Which, with well mushed maggots will be, oooh, say 2 per 100g?

It’s a different approach. And it’s absolutely not “tighter” either.

This also produces an opportunity to repeat an old story. Not wholly sure how true it is but so the saying goes vegans coming from poorer countries end up sometimes with deficiency diseases in the UK. In those foreign places they were gaining a hefty dose of animal proteins from contamination, much less here, and enough less to trigger those diseases.

Walter Zanre told Sky News that wholesale olive oil prices had fallen in recent months but said supermarkets were refusing to follow suit.

“We brought prices down twice last year and it’s not all been passed on to the consumer, which is a huge frustration,” he said.

It follows a surge in the price of olive oil since 2022, after adverse weather in olive-growing countries led to poor harvests.

Spain, which produces almost half of the world’s olive oil, was hit by droughts and heatwaves in 2023 and 2024. The weather caused global olive oil production to fall by almost one million tonnes.

It caused higher prices for many well-known olive oils, including Filippo Berio, which uses a blend of oils from across Europe despite being an Italian brand.

The average price of a 500ml bottle of Filippo Berio has risen from £3.75 in 2022 to £7.50 now, according to the tracker Trolley.co.uk.

Tesco’s own-brand olive oil stands at £5.50 for 500ml. This is up from £5.20 this time last year, Trolley.co.uk data shows. The same-size bottle of Nicolas Alziari olive oil, at Waitrose, sells for £22.50.

The boss of Filippo Berio argued that prices should have come down rapidly for customers after stronger production more recently meant there was better availability of oil.

Obviously, supermarkets are charging what they are because they can. That’s how markets work, that supply, demand thing. Every individul supplier does their best to rip the consumer off – it’s the competition for the profits to be made which reduces prices.

On the other hand, brother harvested his olives (more for fun and exercise, but still) and was being paid €5 a litre at the mill. So on that own brand stuff there’s a 100% mark up, a 50% margin, including all the expenses of bottling, transport, the shop itself and so on. Seems reasonable enough to me.

An investigation by Canada’s national broadcaster has found that a major Quebec producer has been diluting its maple syrup with cane sugar and selling the fraudulent product to grocery chains.

OK, well, adultereated products are hardly new, But:

The industry is worth nearly C$1bn annually and the immense value of the market has lured criminal elements to Quebec’s global strategic reserve of syrup.

In 2011, thieves slowly siphoned off maple syrup worth nearly C$18m from the stockpile, a heist that led to 40 arrests and jail sentences for five men.

The “strategic reserve” is actually the amount that is kept off the market in order to keep prices high.

So we have that well known phenomenon, people being people. Prices are deliberately kept high and therefore there is adulteration to bring prices down. Which, you know, increases the amount that must be spent upon keeping prices high…..

The British government should be stockpiling food, according to a leading expert on food policy, as it is not prepared for climate shocks or wars that could cause the population to starve.

Prof Tim Lang of City St George’s, University of London said the UK produced far less food than it needed to feed itself, and as a small island that relied on a few large companies to feed its giant population, it was particularly vulnerable to shocks.

Was on a radio show with Lang once. His ability to be wrong in service of gaining publicity for Tim Lang is unmatched. The Spud of food policy.

Lang’s report for the National Preparedness Commission, published last year, found that the UK’s food system is extremely vulnerable to attack due to its concentration with a few large companies.

It found that the 12,284 supermarkets around the UK are “fed” by just 131 distribution centres.

These were a “sitting duck” for drone or cyber-attacks by malign states, he said: “The nine big retailers account for 94.5% of all retail food. That’s nine companies, using just 131 distribution centres. In drone war, that’s a sitting duck.”

See?

You know, just everything is always the rise of unchecked corporate power since Ronald Reagan.

Almost a quarter of soup on sale in UK supermarkets has too much salt, study finds

Too much implies that there is some logical, supportable, definition of “enough”.

Analysis of nearly 500 tinned and chilled products finds 23% exceed government’s voluntary salt target

Ah. So more than some made up number patrolled by pecksniff morons then?

Of the 481 soups Action on Salt and Sugar (AoSS) tested,

Ah, yes, pecksniff morons.

Consumers searching for healthy food from trusted sources have fuelled the UK organic market’s biggest boom in two decades, according to vegetable box seller Riverford.

The delivery business, which sells meat, cheese, cookbooks and recipe boxes alongside vegetables, recorded a 6% increase in sales to £117m in the year to May 2025,

Ooooh, ooooh, squeal for piggie! 6% growth!

as the UK organic food and drink market grew by almost 9%

So Riverford is growing slower than the market. Hmm. Food inflation was 4.4% in the 12 months to May 2025. Corporate accounts are not inflation adjusted. So actual sales increased by 1.6%.

Boom, eh?

What ultra-processed foods really do to your body
With UPFs making up 56 per cent of the average UK diet, experts reveal how over-consumption of them can impact our organs and overall health

A properly conservative newspaper would be shouting “Fie!” to these morons. But nooooo:

David Cox
Health and medical journalist

Sigh:

“Overall, poor diet has overtaken tobacco globally as the leading cause of early death,” says Chris van Tulleken, a professor at University College London and author of Ultra-Processed People.

Complete bollocks of course. Unless we’re talking famine which does still kill people.

It opened in 2013 and gained its first Michelin star a year later. It received another in 2022, making it the first site in Wales to win two stars. Prices start at £468 per person.

The restaurant scored one out of five from a visit by Food Standards Agency officers on 5 November, meaning “major improvement” is necessary.

Now, whether this defence is true or not is another matter. But it’s an interesting defence:

“I’m buying sashimi-grade fish from Japan and they’re questioning, ‘Well, we don’t know the water, so how do we know it’s sashimi grade?’

“Well, it is sashimi grade, this stuff’s eaten raw all over the world and just because our rules don’t fit their rules, they’re questioning it … I’ve got a salt chamber for ageing fish but they obviously don’t like the idea of ageing stuff.

Who to believe, eh, who to believe?

It’s so difficult getting to grips with the idea that the local council employees are ignorant cretins, isn;t it…..