Nanny felt a little left out of the Halloween celebrations this year, and has decided that although it was over a week ago she would still like to give someone a fright; just to show us that she is human.
Now she put her thinking cap on and wondered, who would it be best to frighten?
The elderly?
No, she frightens them on a daily basis with her council tax and crime stats.
Working adults?
No she frightens them with her tax rises and health care system.
Wait a minute, what about children?
Brilliant, she hasn't frightened them for a while.
Therefore she got together with her chums at the British Heart Foundation (BHF), and formulated a campaign to scare children about fast food.
This way she kills two birds with one stone, she gives the kids a scare and pisses off the fast food industry (which she hates with venom).
Brilliant!
An awareness campaign called Food4Thought found that more than a third of 8-14 year olds had no clue what the main ingredient in potato chips was (some children answered oil, eggs, apples, and flour). Additionally, another nearly 4 in ten of them did not know that milk was the primary item that comprised cheese.
What does this tell us about many children in this country?
They are pig ignorant.
How has this appalling level of ignorance come about?
Parents no longer spend time with their children, in the kitchen, showing them how to cook.
Why?
Nanny has told parents that both of them must work, and parents have happily handed over the upbringing (aside from just the basic 3 R's) to Nanny.
A very dangerous state of affairs indeed.
The BHF has a solution to this, they intend to put up over 600,000 posters all across the UK that show the contents of an average chicken nugget and hot dog (gristle, bone, chicken scrotum and general gunge of that ilk).
This, in their view, will help educate children and deter them from mindlessly consuming foods that they have no idea what it is made of.
Peter Hollins, the director general of the BHF, said:
"Kids have lost touch with the most basic foods and no longer understand what they are eating.
Banning foods or telling children not to eat them is not enough - we must engage children in understanding why certain foods are less healthy than others."
Notice how easily Nanny uses the word "ban" whenever she pontificates on a subject that she disapproves of.
The trouble is, best practice with respect to eating is learnt at home; until parents wrest responsibility for the upbringing of their children from Nanny, change and improvement will not occur.
Relying on Nanny to sort out this mess, merely gives her more power over our daily lives.
"... average chicken nugget and hot dog (gristle, bone, chicken scrotum and general gunge of that ilk)."
ReplyDeleteSeems reasonable. I caught a few minutes of one of those 'lets make a program about people living like they did xxx centuries ago' programs the other night.
The main theme was how they slaughtered a pig (looked gruesome but was probably far more humane than it would have been way back then) and then attempted to make use of every bit of it, as had been the case for millenia.
Now that seems a very good message to me in terms of efficiency, ecology and health.
Less effort required to obtain benefits of food, perhaps clothing and the like and tools or components of tools.
No waste of scarce resources or the plant materials required to raise them.
No rotting remains lying around to pollute the local environment.
So using up the scraps you listed and turning them into something useful should be applauded rather than vilified. After all it continues the traditions from the past that many of the green persuasion encourage us all to adopt.
Where's the beef?
The beef is in my freezer.
ReplyDeletewrt chicken's scrotums, parson's noses etc these are all perfectly edible; and in fact they are rather tasty.
I love em!
As for pigs, the only thing you can't use in a pig is the oink!
I have a rather good recipe for pig's trotters in my book "Accountants Can Cook"
Click on the "Accountants Can Cook" link in the righthand menu bar to donwload the book for free, or go to the "Aaccountants Can Cook" section of my main site www.kenfrost.com
Happy eating!
Ken
I must have missed something - how does telling kids that chicken burgers are full of random bits of chicken (shock!) help them understand that chips come from potatoes and cheese is made from milk?
ReplyDeleteNot to mention the fact that even the bloody BHF don't seem to understand that a chicken is a whole animal and not just those lovely skinless organic breast things that magically appear in plastic in supermarkets.
You can't buy ox-tail because as it's an extension of the spinal cord it's banned from human consumption. Another tasty meal lost to the anti-BSE hysteria.
ReplyDeleteI can buy oxtail in Croydon
ReplyDeleteShhh....Nanny's Safe Food Nazis may be listening. There you are, Croydon can't be ALL bad if you can buy ox-tail;-)
ReplyDeleteMy next door neighbour tells me she has a mean recipe for Pigs Trotter with onion (iirc) and loves tripe.
ReplyDeleteI'm not so sure about the tripe thing and I don't have a foot fetish so they may not be things I would knowingly crave but I have no problem if others do.
My most vivid memory of junior school dinners was a regular weekly punishment that involved some evil looking green coloured liver which was truly disgusting. It was decades before I discovered that it was possible to cook liver in a way that could make it really rather delicious.
No wonder people prefer their leftovers to look like something different to what they are made of.
Typically, and at great expense, a simple message has been lost.
ReplyDeleteIt's more than likely that the chemical additives in processed food, eaten in excess because basic cookery is a lost art, will poison you.
Just as the consumption of most parts of an animal is traditional, so the food industry embraces the tradition of passing food products as being of better quality than they actually are.