Adventures In Supermarkets

When I'm in other parts of the country I like to go to the supermarkets there and poke around at the different products. No really. I find this fun.

So I slipped off last time I was staying with my parents to pop to Morrisons. The one in Heywood if you're playing along at home. I picked up the bits I needed (toothpaste, why do I always have to forget toothpaste) and headed to my favourite aisles. It goes like this:

1. Fruit and veg
2. Bakery (stock up on muffins)
3. International foods section

Ahh the international food section. Where you can find Polish biscuits hobnobbing (ahem.) with giant bags of gram flour bases purely on the idea that they aren't traditional British. Depending on the area you can find some real treasures here. 

Happiness is imported 

This entry is dedicated to Jelly. Oh Jelly. I love you. Of course Jelly is made from animal bits and I don't eat those. There are vegetarian Jellies in existence, some you can find in health food stores and some you can find in supermarkets, but it's still exciting to find a new one. Especially if it's mango flavoured. 

So I saw the mango flavoured loveliness and as it had Halal slapped across the box I checked the ingredients: 

Refined Sugar, Vegetable Gum, Adipic Acid, Potassium Citrate, Potassium Chloride, Mango flavour, E102 and E110

Awesome cool. I can eat that.

Attack Of The Boringly Shaped Gelatinous Blob

Yesterday I made up a batch and then pored it into... where did all my glass go... in to a ramekin. Stephen had thrown out the pretty glass because we never use it. The fact that he did this around a year ago and I didn't notice is hardly justification. Anyway I pored it into a ramekin. Making the most boring looking jelly in history. I'll have to buy moulds if I'm going to make a habit of this. And I might. Jelly is delicious and this one tastes like mango.

Meat Free Mondays

While writing my last post, I discovered Meat Free Mondays, and decided to give it a go. However, as I don't eat meat every day anyway (I usually have chicken twice a week and fish twice a week), I needed to go further: I needed to replace a meat meal with a vegetarian meal. Here's the result:



...a Linda McCartney country pie (soya mince rather than chicken), with boiled Riverford new(ish) potatoes with Pure diary-free organic spread. Not just vegetarian, but vegan. Clare will be proud.

She is, he isn't

Almost every veggie forum has a thread on this. Should I date a non-veg, can you date a non-veg? I'm going to throw you hopes of getting an answer out of the window here. I don't know. Here is how it works for us though.

We're both quite laid back people in our own way. We don't really stress about our differences and it doesn't bother us that we eat different things.

Stephen has stopped eating red meat since he met me but I never tried to persuade him too and I don't try to persuade him to give up more. He - of course - has never tried to make me eat meat.

When tea time rolls round you can usually find us cooking and eating separate things. Sometimes it's completely separate. Stephen has a list of food he doesn't like so when I'm craving curry or Chinese food I leave him out of it.

Occasionally we'll try to eat the same side dish and different mains. Here I've made myself an extra large portion of Home Fries with added mushrooms and a large dollop of salsa. Stephen's fries got put into a separate pan when I added the other veggies to mine as he isn't a fan of peppers or onions. His is served with breaded chicken.

Other times we manage to eat the same thing. He wants to experiment with spinach so we made potato and spinach gnocchi, served with a dollop of cheese sauce. It gave us a rare oppertunity to cook together and made us feel warm inside.

I know this isn't an exciting post but we're not the conflict type. But this is how our kitchen works. And if you are trying a mixed relationship, good luck.

News just in from the PPK. A picture posted of an eagle, trussed up and unable to move. A chicken pecks at it. The farmers are putting the live eagles in with the chickens and then releasing them. The eagle flies home too scared of chickens to return. Supposedly. The picture is chilling and disturbing. I was hoping that someone would have some response. The RSPB perhaps with an address to write to. But instead I found something just as chilling.

The Daily Mail article on the subject as written by Caroline Graham which has some rather odd ways of describing things. 'The chickens can wreak their revenge'. Yes, this is all the work of the chicken. The innocent chicken who can finally get its own back on the horrible evil eagle who is picking on it.

Not really. The eagle is following instinct, the chicken is following instinct. It’s the farmer who is knowingly torturing a living being.

Then, stunningly the Mail goes on to present this as a victory for the little man over government red tape. They tell us ‘farmers have complained for years’, say that the eagles are ‘stealing their chickens but [the farmers] face fines or even jail if they kill the birds.’ The sentence structure sets us up to believe that the action of the farmers is justified. Something horrible is happening but if the farmers take action bureaucracy will come down on them. Too bad it couldn’t be blamed on the EU.

‘So instead,’ Graham continues, ‘they have come up with the idea of catching but not killing them to avoid incurring any penalties.’ To me this has the tone of someone about to say how ingenious. Salivating over a legal loop hole.

They fact that no alternative viewpoint is given to that of the farmer means that his views are not questioned. ‘They say after the trussed-up birds [sic] is freed it never returns - while the chickens also learn self defence against the birds of prey.’ This seems absurd to me but it is presented here without a counter. And by finishing on Mr Wu’s quote he is given the final word, the last say. The all-important point that sticks in the mind of the reader. And this time it’s the justification that we are expected to remember, not the pain or the suffering. ‘Otherwise my chickens will all disappear’

Allow me to speculate for a second as to why this article is as it is. The editorial policy of the Mail is well known and strongly enforced. Even without Dacre over your shoulder the presence creeps through. Everyone knows the party line and is expected to push it. Add to that tabloid writing, by its nature, is more embellished. There are more direct links between points, more adjectives and more colour. This leads to dubious connections being made and expanded upon. Even if it is absurd to the observer.

Then there is the question of what is this story. Is it a serious piece? Something about science, nature or agriculture? Or is it a weird news bit with a ‘those wacky Chinese’ tone. To me it should have been the former but is more likely the latter. That is why there is no other viewpoint.

To me this seems like an ‘isn’t this odd’ piece that has been stretched to fit political points. Points about bureaucracy gone mad and the little man triumphing against the evil predator. This is a bad taste article about a horrific practise.

Fishes in the water, fishes in the sea

We’re going to have a ‘let’s talk about’ blog again today.

When I was little my Dad pointed to the side of a can of tuna and said ‘this means it’s dolphin friendly, make sure the fish your Mum buys is dolphin friendly’ Of course my Mum, who doesn’t see the point in unleaded petrol, energy saving light bulbs or votes for women, didn’t care but a lot of people do. Almost every can of tuna I care to look for in a supermarket says dolphin friendly. 

That doesn’t make the tuna fish friendly though. As a vegetarian my concern is that it’s not very friendly for the tuna but beyond that the inhabitants of the seas are hardly doing a song or dance. Here are a handful of the problems:

•  Tuna stocks are declining or depleted in some areas.
  
• Fishing tuna can result in a bycatch (like fishy collateral damage) of fish, turtles, marine mammals and birds.
• Especially when Fish Aggregation Devices are used to attract tuna to a particular location. They don’t just attract tuna.
• Some species of tuna are becoming endangered due to fishing like the Northern Bluefin (picture courtesy of Wikimedia)

 
Luckily this is one of those areas where you can make a difference. As a vegetarian my perfect solution would be to stop eating fish but if you aren’t going to go that far (let’s be optimistic and say yet) you can still cut down on your tuna intake. A tuna sandwich is going to be a bit shit without it but pasta bake won’t suffer. Should you still desire to buy a can check out this list that Greenpeace has come up with: Tuna retailers league table. 

Let's have a chat about PETA

I’m going to talk about the PETA McLean thing. I’m not the first. I’m not going to add anything new to the discussion or the debate. My criticism won’t be astounding. I probably won’t win any converts.

I’m just going to be me for a second. One voice. If people hear my one voice and they hear others maybe they will realise that this isn’t okay, or that there is compassion left in the world.

I have occasionally been happy with PETA. There list of companies that doesn’t test on animals has led to many a happy shopping trip, there ‘I am not a nugget’ t-shirt is beyond cute. I have, on even more occasions, hated them.

On a local level I have seen small shops graffiti with PETA stencils (which I find abhorrent both from the standpoint of protest and street art) okay, that shop sell meat, it’s a small working class deli, but the also tagged streetlights.

On a larger level I’m still wondering what gratuitous shots of scantily clad celebrities have to do with animal rights. Basically hot people do this so should you advertising is illogical and slightly pathetic.

Yeah, factory farming is bad. I know this. It is my belief that factory farming is bad that lead me to become a vegetarian in the first place. I didn’t want to cause that harm. At the same time I don’t want to cause harm to people either.

When my aunt died of a smoking related cancer it was far less sudden and less shocking. Yet if someone had used her without our permission as a political message, saying that you shouldn’t smoke perhaps, I would have been devastated. Personal grief is hard enough to cope with. Making it public, debatable like this is terrible. Not to mention the complete lack of taste involved in recounting a death scene like this.

‘PETA is running the ad to make people rethink the proposition that it is, rightly so, a criminal act to kill and eat our own kind but that it's "OK" to kill every other species but our own and eat them.’

That point is going to be lost. For many the equation doesn’t balance. People who don’t see it like that - vegan, vegetarian and omnivorous alike – are going to be turned off. Turned off PETA, we can only pray not turned off the idea of causing less suffering to all living things.

Meat Cravings

Hot dogs, burgers, pepperoni pizzas, roast chicken, tandoori chicken... We could go on. We could talk about the meat I miss all day. Some people don't miss it or some can just watch a video of animal cruelty, think about how unhealthy it all is and the cravings just go away. Me not so much.

I see the hot dog stand and I drool, I see chicken being cooked and yum it looks so good. In the future I may not. My cravings may go. They may not.

I was sat in Stephen's computer room on a dry hot day. It was perfect barbecue weather. I wanted a burger. I wanted a burger bad. There where, of course, no burgers on hand and no burger places nearby. More importantly than any of that though is that I am a vegetarian. I choose not to eat meat. I chose not to give into the cravings. I choose to harm as little as possible.

The day after I was on the train home. I bought some sweets in the shop, sweets that I'd eaten as a kid and all through my life. I suppose you can guess what is coming. They had gelatin in them and I didn't realize. I was really upset by this. An animal had died, probably suffered in it's life for some sweets I was eating to pass the time on a train journey. And yesterday I wanted a burger, that is why I don't give into cravings. It's like an itchy rash that you scratch until it is infected*.

Somehow along the line I've learned compassion. Before I went vegetarian I didn't really care about animals. I did on an intellectual level but I didn't feel it in my heart. I didn't get upset knowing that animals suffer. Now I get upset by seeing a horse who is kicking the side of it's horse box (although I'm obviously not against that) and come close to tears over cruelly treated monkeys.

Intuition, reason and experience are the three steps to faith. That's what we talked about in our Buddhism day. I had the intuitive feeling that vegetarianism was right for me, I reasoned it out knowing that limiting the suffering I cause was the right thing to do and trying new foods in preparation for the day I would be vegetarian and finally I experienced it. In my heart I have faith that what I am doing is right.

That isn't to say that I'm perfect or at the end of the path. This is just the story so far.

*remind me of that next time I have eczema!