The Curse of Sourcing
We're townies by birth, but have accidentally fallen into a way of life that some people call the curse of sourcing. It's the danger of being a foodie. It's starts with cooking, then goes on to wanting to find the best - not the most expensive - ingredients available, and then snowballs into trying to control all your intake. For us a vegetable plot came first; then chickens for eggs; then pigs for pork; and, then, chickens for meat. The aim of course is self-sufficiency, but it ain't easy.
But being choosy is not easy. Okay, sure, we can all go down the local supermarket and get just what we want; whatever takes our fancy, they've got it, no matter what the time of year, or the weather. Problem is, you begin to get a sneaking suspicion - just a voice in the back of the mind - that all of it just tastes the same: bland and boring.
Sometime back someone gave us a pack of streaky to fry - we'd hadn't any in the fridge, it was a lazy Sunday morning, we were chilled, coffee in the pot and a bacon sandwich seemed such a good idea. Okay, it was in a plastic pack again, and okay, it looked white, slimy and anaemic , but, it came from one of our more up-market UK supermarkets and yes, I'd seen the advert: rich pictures of food bouncing across a glossy work surface with full orchestral background.
I put in into the pan and within minutes the tell-tale white scum had appeared - bacon which had been pumped up with salted water to make it heavier and 'tastier'. And this from one of our 'finest' supermarkets. In any other industry it would be tantamount to fraud, but what the heck, no-one complains, so who cares? And then the thought that maybe this bacon was from an overseas producer, the guys that still use sow crates - thankfully banned here - where a sow can either stand, or lie down, tethered, but that's it, for her whole life.
Sow Crate
Think about it - stand, or lie down, in a crate barely as big as yourself - for your whole life. For anyone who has ever watched a pig playing in a field, you won't realise the hardship that that poor crated animal pig has to suffer. Pigs are playful creatures - ours have their mad moment in the early evening, after food time. They take off at high speed, pirouette in almost a full circle, stand still a second, than dash off again at full throttle. A pig runs by its hind legs pushing together, while its front legs stride out: in this way it picks up a useful velocity, ears back, snout out and tail wagging like a dog. They then bury those noses into the ground for a quick bug hunt - happiness personified.
Its not all paradise of course. Pigs get bored and fed up like most animals (like most humans). The pigs might also have an off day, but, all in all, we think keeping them in a field is closer to their natural environment than keeping them in a concrete pen, in which they see nothing all day, but drab cement.
We have another axe to grind. We bought a couple of pork chops the other day from a mini-supermarket that makes many claims about the quality of its meat.
Firstly, we hate buying meat in plastic packets. But get this, the first thing that got us was a list of ingredients. Ingredients? Pork you mean? Well, yes, you buy two pork chops and there is pork there, reassuringly some 89% of it, then, in descending order, comes added water (5%), dried glucose syrup, salt, acidity regulators (sodium acetate, sodium citrates) and antioxidant (sodium ascorbate).
Right. On the plus side, the label states its born, reared and prepared in the U.K., and non-GM feeds are used. But come on, 89% pork, with added water and dried glucose syrup. Call me a cynic, but doesn't the water add weight and the syrup a stab at some kind of taste, as though the poor pork needs a bit of help. Who's kidding who here? Yet we're paying £5.49 a kilo for this type of pork, complete with 'added' ingredients.
And think about the pork that's in processed meals, which has to make no attempt at saying where, or how its reared. Where is this meat coming from - there is no way you can trace the origins of the meat.
Why Pigs?
There's an old saying: dogs look up to you, cats look down on you, but pigs, they look you straight in the eye.
There's some truth in that, but we don't know if it explains the recent popularity of the pig.
For a supposed smelly, and sometimes cussed animal, it has a growing fan base, including many TV personalities.
Keeping chickens on a small-scale was recently the U.K.'s fastest growing hobby - maybe not so now that someone has invented bird-flu hysteria - but if it wasn't for the question of land, I would venture to suggest that keeping pigs in your back garden would come a close second.
But what you never realise when you madly decide to rear a few pigs, is that the state, in the form of Defra, is not that encouraging.
Agricultural rules are made for the big boys - the major players that can afford to not only implement the latest missive from the farming Gulag, but also look the other way when it suits them - look at the recent turkey episodes.
So when the rules are drawn up to cater for the farming leviathans, everyone is sucked into the subsequent ridiculous vortex.
Therefore, even if you own one pig, then you to abide by the same legislation that's geared for a producer of thousands of pigs.
You keep one pig on a piece of land, then that piece of land has to have a unique number, given to you by the Gulag; you also have to have your own, unique herd number; and, after a recent piece of madness, if you take your pig on a journey of over 40 miles (who decided that figure I wonder), then you have to get a special certificate.
In the end, you become a bureaucratic functionary, peddling an ever-accelerating treadmill of paperwork and rules. The fun for the smallholder is gradually being drained away and that, I guess, is just what the big boys want: it leaves the way for production food, created from cloned animals that never have to see the light of day.
