Seems like I'm spending a fortune on food lately....

curious2garden

Well-Known Mod
Staff member
they're handy to have, and make heating things up quick, but the real problem with them is that they tempt people to eat shit.
you can cook good stuff in a microwave, but why bother when you can cook cheap garbage in half the time?
I heat up my smoked items in my microwave. Keeps the meat moist :) It also has this wondeful turbo defrost when I've forgotten to put out meat from my freezer, zap/cook/eat yum
 

ANC

Well-Known Member
I guess I could mess around with corn on the cob in a pot or on the coals, but it takes only 3 mins in the microwave.

I like eating good food, but I don't eat much.
Busy braaing some chicken kebabs while building my lights on the floor. in the heat from the fire.
 

tyler.durden

Well-Known Member
Not argumentative, just realistic. I've seen how things go, and having lived through assorted "food scares", from the revelation that there's all sorts of bacteria in chicken (No shit, sherlock) to Mad Cow Disease and more, acknowledge that unless you know the source personally, and you living in a more rural area will have a better chance than a city dweller, you really don't know. We have origins shown on fresh food, whether it's fish, meat or whatever, strict regulation on food and so on, but even then there was a nice one here last year involving eggs where shelves were cleared thanks to it being found out that various places had been using an insecticide called Fipronil in the chicken farms. There was no real danger to anyone, but, also, nobody could say how long they had been doing that, rendering all the "guarantees" useless. The Shergar Lasagne was another perfect example of how wrong these "strict" controls can go, and we won't go into the use of antibiotics and other drugs in the farming of animals.

I mean, here's a scenario. Supermarket A sells something that is packaged as "100% Australian" and has a paper trail to the supplier saying it is. But it isn't, it's something using horse instead of beef. Someone finds out, questions get asked, trail goes from supermarket to supplier. Sounds good so far. So the supplier, let's say "Supplier X" gets lots of questions asked, but has a paper trail saying they got the ingredients from "Supplier Y" so off everyone goes following the trail which leads to ANOTHER supplier who has a paper trail eventually leading to Slaughterhouse B, who deny all knowledge and prove that the documentation has been falsified at some point. How does the system deal with that, who is to blame if documentation has been falsified to mask the trail, especially if the business who allegedly got the meat from the slaughterhouse suddenly "disappears"? That isn't some fantasy, it has happened as the system is only as good as the enforcement, and since the authorities can never hope to check all products then they do rely on trust and that's where things can fall down when there's a buck to be made, as nobody will do anything until AFTER something dodgy has been discovered and, like your land found out with the Hep A berries from "Creative Gourmet", then the damage is done as the reality is people expect no risks when the label is telling them that it's a "good" product. Unfortunately, there's money to be made and some will abuse that trust.

The other favourite one, and I ain't sure how it works with you, is the famous "Produced in" label. We have things saying "produced in the EU" but that can just mean someone has taken something from, say, South Africa, and then packaged it in an EU country, yet the impression is that the product was made here. Misleading? I think so but it's legal.

As I say, we have to be realistic regarding labels as they are no actual guarantee, you soon learn where the "better" places for things are, what is decent and what isn't. Like you, I don't do "ready meals", not when I can make the same thing for less and it's much healthier. Like you, that processed cheese muck doesn't get in my door. I don't do salmon at all now, because it's impossible to find "wild" instead of "farmed" which is much better and full of less chemicals and fats than the farmed stuff. We don't do that nasty bread in plastic bags here, luckily we've got a hell of a lot of bakeries here so decent bread is never far away 7 days a week or, of course, I make my own. And as far as junk food goes, I think McDonalds is perfect for vegetarians because I've never found anything I would class as meat in their burgers, that chemically-fuelled shit gets nowhere near my mouth, not when I can get a freshly made sandwich for less.

As you say, the food chain is evolving. The problem is, like with many things, the legislative side of things doesn't evolve as fast, the authorities are always playing "catch up". "Proper" labelling helps, but only when the system can't be abused to hell, and my view is that people put too much faith in such labels because the system can be abused to hell, blind faith is never a good thing and people should be a bit more sceptical.

Buying as local to you as possible is the best way, for various reasons from knowing how it's produced to saving the baby polar seal penguins due to a lower "carbon footprint" thanks to less time spent being shipped around the country or, indeed, the world but that's not always possible, especially here where fruit is concerned as Belgium is hardly a country known for it's bananas.

Anyway, we're drifting away from the thing about spending too much on food.

 

Roger A. Shrubber

Well-Known Member
i do like a convection oven, bacon comes out so nice, flat and crispy......and you can reheat pizza in about two minutes, and the edges of the crust aren't all plast-icky.....


of course i can't have any of that....so buy a damn microwave for all i care :finger:
 

curious2garden

Well-Known Mod
Staff member
i do like a convection oven, bacon comes out so nice, flat and crispy......and you can reheat pizza in about two minutes, and the edges of the crust aren't all plast-icky.....


of course i can't have any of that....so buy a damn microwave for all i care :finger:
I love my convection oven and I don't reheat pizza in it LOL but mine dries out meat on reheating so it is microwaves for me! Don't worry I'm going to die from working in the c-arm so the microwaves won't get me neener neener
 
Top