Quite Random

Meaty sweeties

Mars starts using animal products

Mars, Twix, Snickers, Maltesers, Bounty, Minstrels and Milky Way now contain rennet, a substance which is extracted from the stomach lining of calves, after they have been deep frozen, ground up, and treated with acid. It’s a by-product of veal production.

Lots of jelly sweets, trifles and, duh, jelly, contain gelatin. Gelatin is produced using pork skins, pork and cattle bones, or split cattle hides.

Children eat sweets, vegetarians eat sweets, we all eat them, but isn’t it weird that you can’t taste the meatiness?

Chicken drummers and turkey twizzlers bear little or no physical resemblance to the animals they came from. Sirloin steaks, bacon, sausages and burgers are all three steps removed from the animals they came from by processing and packaging.

I’d like to introduce a new rule, to help people make a better informed decision about what they eat. I’d like to make it obligatory to show people the entire production process for meat and meat by-products, including how the animals are raised, slaughtered, processed and prepared. I’d like to make it impossible for someone to buy packaged meat, a meat sandwich, even a Mars Bar, without having a full understanding of what went into it.

I eat meat, and I’m not saying anyone should stop, but maybe if people ate less, shopped more conscientiously, just gave a flying fuck where their food came from, less meat might need to be produced. It’s not just about cute calves. The meat production industry is the single biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions on Earth.

Meet your meat.

Bugger.

Friday, and another week grinds to a close. I’m mystified by the same problem Adrianne’s having – my trousers have all shrunk. My 501s are hanging in there, but I had a very depressing moment the other day when I put on my North Face trousers, the ones I wore throughout 2005, and when I finally relaxed, the popper popped open and my gut, Homer Simpson-like, reinflated, jiggled, and settled. Shit. Too much booze, too much chocolate, not enough doing energetic stuff. I’m drifting, as Marwood put it, into the arena of the unwell. OK, I haven’t broken my ankle or anything, I just feel turgid.

At home we waste food on a scale I haven’t achieved in several years. Buying food in fits and spurts, poor meal planning, taking things out to defrost before throwing them away a few days later, letting things dry out in the fridge, cooking too much, leaving leftovers, buying takeaways. I hate it. I could control my consumption living on my own, but sharing with someone else hasn’t made it as easy, and perfectly good food keeps ending up in the bin. It’s heartbreaking, I have got into bad habits, and I have to stop it.

Humans are eating the planet. There are currently six and a half billion of us, increasing to nine and a half billion in the next forty to fifty years. Yes. Within your lifetime, if you’re lucky, there will be just under fifty percent more people on the planet than there are now. Food production is already responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than anything else, from food processing and packaging to agricultural production and livestock emissions, and yet food production is contributing to climate change that will decimate agriculture in many parts of the world.

I like not to get too carried away with alarmist predictions for the future, but really, we’re screwed. Soylent Green, anyone?

Calorific

1 Calorie:
The amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water 1 degree Celsius (°C), equivalent to approximately 4000 Joules of energy, or 1 Kilojoule. Known as a large calorie or a kilocalorie.

1 calorie:
The amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water 1 °C, or approximately 4 Joules of energy. Known as a small calorie.

An average human male requires approximately 10 MJ of energy every day, or approximately a third of a litre of petrol (which contains 36 MJ). A human male however cannot drink petrol unless they are insane, or attempting self-emmoliation. Therefore they need to work out how much energy they need in calories, as food packaging sadly does not give energy readings in terms of fractions of a litre of petrol.

1 large calorie, a Calorie, is 1000 small calories, or calories, which is also 4.18 kJ. Two different measures, spelt the same, the capitalisation of the first letter being the only distinguishing feature between them. This probably explains why so many diets go very wrong.

If a human male requires 10 MJ of energy, 1 MJ being 1 million Joules, this equals 10000 kJ, 10000 thousand Joules, or 10000000 Joules. 10000 kJ therefore equals 2392.35 Calories. That’s Calories not calories.

I need a lie down.

Must… show… restraint… at.. the… buffet!

We’ve just been to the superb Lal Qila Indian buffet on the Tottenham Court Road for lunch, and once more I have shown that I have no restraint in a buffet-type eating situation. Eyes bigger than stomach, I went crazy. This is why you must have a good breakfast if you expect to eat a buffet lunch - it is a buffer, a behavioural inhibitor, all that stands between you and a stomach-stretching carbo-binge that leaves you in a catatonic stupor for the afternoon, feeding sugary snacks and caffeine in to your body just to ward off the mother of all post-sugar-rush crashes. A highly reputable chef once told me that ‘good food has height’ - I think he was referring to a carefully constructed tower of goat’s cheese, wild rocket and balsamic vegetables, not a groaning pile of naan bread and curry.

A good quality meal usually consists of a few separate items, carefully chosen to compliment each other. A buffet meal however consists of piling as much food as you can manage on to your plate, a little bit of about fifteen different dishes, with the end result that you have decided to opt out of a gastronomic experience and instead go for an eating contest, with a plate of food that looks like the plate-scrapings from a wedding before you’ve even started.

It isn’t just Indian food - the buffet binge can happen with Chinese food, with the obvious result that you actually sweat monosodium glutamate for some time afterwards, or with Pizza-hut style Italian food, where the sides of salad bowls are shored up with cucumber slices just to hold more bacon bits and coleslaw, and the pizza-eating continues until tomato sauce starts leaking from your tear ducts.

Needless to say, after all this greed, guilt sets in, so you’re a fat, overfed, debauched, lazy, monosodium glutamate-sweating slob, your heart valves making noises like rusty gate hinges, your veins lined with ghee, your stomach moving outwards so rapidly that you may never see your genitalia again without the aid of mirrors.

I must, must, must show restraint at the buffet.