Don't Let Anyone Change Who You Are - By Telling You What to Eat! (rant)

Today I was leafing through the local adverts from a supermarket - it's getting close to Christmas and I would expect it to be full of items people might think they need for these holiday dinners...such as the veg, some kind of meat, flour and fixings for desserts and so forth.

However I was quite surprised at how far away the marketing has come from reality and perhaps how far away I am now from the rubbish they are expecting people to buy and eat (and I have an Honours degree in Food Marketing, so I studied this stuff). The thing that got me going was that there was not one single raw ingredient advertised in over 10 pages of pictures and prices.

Each and every single item was of something prepared, either cooked or ready to put in the oven and cook. So, it seems you are expected to purchase your 'holiday' meals ready to pop in the oven (or microwave?) and just press a button.

Then presto - it's like some sort of magic - you have a ready made already assembled Christmas dinner - all you have to do is fork this into your mouth.

This is not the kind of magic I am interested in at all. Who wants someone else's energy (hung over employee unhappy with wages, co-workers, self and life) spread all over their food? It's more then enough to deal with our own stuff, but at least that's familiar to us!

Oh, but my rant continues! You are not only expected to buy and eat this prepared food (it's cheap), the ingredients are already selected for you. You can have carrots, potatoes, parsnips or 2 other vegetables combinations. With tiny bits of parsley as a garnish.

What happened to the other 90 vegetables in the kingdom? Where are the real herbs? Does everything have to be slathered in butter? Not to mention cooked and then packed in plastic trays (were they cooked in plastic too?).

Probably tastes like garbage bags....

I mean why would they even bother with the plastic trays of 'food' - why not condense it down further and just put each dinner into pill form and we can all pop those. So convenient - we wouldn't even have to taste anything...

Indeed, it seems as if they are busy creating their own reality...with the consumer in mind.

Do yourself a favour this year - find some different vegetables at a Farmers market (organic if you can) look for celeriac, purple carrots, rare varieties of apples, heaps of fresh herbs - and then look up recipes online or make up your own.

Have some fun with your food - but whatever you do, handle and prepare it yourself. Don't let anyone dictate to you what your meals should consist of by cooking them for you....don't let anyone change who you are.

April

Now, we need to get our green branches and it will take shape... table centre piece 

Liquid Gold - Bees & Honey

Since today is a food day, I have been cooking and eating all day! Which is not how things usually are however,  I have been working on some more recipes and we had some tasting to do. Besides, what else would there be to do on a rainy Thursday at home?

Well, one other thing I have been doing is filtering honey through a muslin cloth into jars for storage. We just moved a hive to higher ground and in the shift had to remove quite a bit of old comb (they had lots) and ended up with some lovely honey.

Of course this is a messy job and everyone in the house wants to be in on it - so everyone and everything gets sticky! The one thing I have noticed myself doing (again) is comparing my honey from my own bees to something that would come in a jar from Tesco's for instance.

Of course, my first thought is that Tesco honey looks 'like honey' - which is what we as consumers have been trained to expect from a honey product. These thoughts brought me back to the years spent working on my honey project at CAFRE college in Northern Ireland and the things I found out about myself and others as a consumer (or a well trained monkey!)

Well, first of all, the honey we have in our hives is different from something found in a shop. We do not feed our bees and do not treat with anything. We also keep a large herb garden. But more then that, we use the comb honey, untreated, unheated - as is.

Unless I want some filtered for baking and cooking - which is what I am doing today, we eat the honey straight from the hives. I wouldn't' for the life of me want to alter anything this precious. 

However I know enough about this subject and how honey is processed before it arrives on a store shelf to understand that our perceptions of honey are shaped by what is available to us from a shop. When I was working on my study at CAFRE college, during some of the food labs, I surveyed people extensively about their tastes, preferences and expectations for honey.

What was uncovered was that none of their preferences were based in reality - people wanted medium coloured, light tasting, clear honey - the type that would indicate it was blended from multiple sources, heated to high temperatures and imported in from God knows where. 

Yet, they expected this commercially produced honey to be very good for them and have medicinal properties. 

Very few people would have known to use local honey, on the comb when you can get it, unheated, untreated - right out of the hive is best, especially if you want it for medicinal purposes. And that local honey colours and tastes vary from season to season as well as within each hive. 

Bees which have access to herbs such as thyme, sage, lavender and chamomile would produce a great tasting honey as well as perhaps be quite healthy and strong themselves. Each of these factors is important for us to know as informed consumers (taking the game to another level). 

If you like honey and have a back garden, you should consider keeping bees, you don't have much to do with them, just plant a few herbs or flowers and let them do their thing. 

They are an indicator species for the planet - if they fail to thrive, so do we. That seems pretty important to me.

Well, off to keep going with the honey!

Have a healthy day,

April

Top Bar hive in back garden