Why cook at All?

We had a great plug last week when BBC3 in its series on teaching people to cook featured a family in Putney who relied on takeaway food. Click here to watch the programmeAmongst the junk they also ate SCOFF and our plug was great(Delivery man, box, daughter when told of SCOFF was eaten rather than cooking replying 'Yum - is there any for me?', great shot of rare breed sausages, mash and veg after 32 minutes). The only issue I had with the programme was with the observations it made. It claimed that the family paid £7.95 per serve for lasagne from SCOFF (it does), but could make it for £1.50 per serve. In actual fact our serve at sales price £7.95 costs considerably more to make than £1.50 in raw ingredients alone (and serves a little more than 1 portion they were cooking in its place. In order for us to provide this we:
source beef from cattle grass fed on a farm in Devon we know (they used cheap supermarket beef in the programme)
buy organic milk, british cheese and butter for our sauce
use organic tomatoes in our ragu base
cook and deliver this to order within 45 minutes of the order being received
deliver the meal hot in 45 minutes
So - we saved Anton going to the farmers market where he would have paid £2 for the single serve of beef, £2 for the other ingredients, 1.5 hours of his time (about £9 on minimum wage), delivery cost - about £2.95 (the cheapest you can get anything delivered in London). So the comparative cost is more like £15.95, not £1.50. (Oh - and the government charges us VAT on takeaway food, but not on groceries or ready meals. In fact, after taking VAT off the price we charge we are considerably cheaper than Anton can make (if you factor in his time and convenience).
There is a price for convenience, and I'm delighted that families such as Anton's are buying great food from us. The real story from the night was that the most important thing they found was eating together was a pleasure, rather than individually. As a thank you for being such a loyal customer (and the plug we didn't know about) Anton's family wins a family meal for 4 (feeds 4 - 5), which features a main meal, vegetables or salad, organic ice cream for pudding, all for £25. Why bother to cook when you can outsource your food preparation with such great provennace for such a good price and sit around the table together to eat it!

The Future of Food (part 2)

Last night's episode http://tinyurl.com/mvkgm4m was even more shocking in many ways than the first episode.

The presentation is remarkably calm, and perhaps too calm? Over the course of the hour if you really listened carefully the very scary message that within our lifetime we would run out of major meat and fish is pretty disturbing. Incidentally, grass fed cattle, which we have been eating and promoting is by far the most sustainable. The UK are pretty far ahead with this, but in the US and Argentina, the vast majority are grain fed. 15kg's of grain to make 1kg of beef. Not only does this sound wasteful, but it is now proven that this is an unsustainable model.

Not sure governments will do anything. My guess is that simple economics will sort it out when the price of fish and beef goes sky high. But then the environmental consequences of this are huge.

I recommend you take some time out and watch this.

Future of Food

BBC 2 are showing a series of programmes on the future of food - http://tinyurl.com/orvvlt

Watched last night and in a nutshell:

• Mixed farming better than monoculture (no surprise there)
  
• We consume too much meat (not new)
  
• Our diets in the western world are lazy and too dependent on oil use (crude, not olive)
  
• We are going to run out of food. Presently half the world is obese and half hungry.
  

With a background in food and agriculture I am sure anyone with a similar background to us would have sat watching the BBC shouting at the telly. This is all stuff we know about, has been in the public domain for years and for some reason successive governments have just ignored it. As a nation we don't feed our kids the right foodstuffs. Not feeding their brains and feeding them bad foods encourages obesity (which we can all see now as a huge problem) and worse, our intelligence is suffering as a result.

Can we do anything about this – of course we can if we all want to. We have to however get rid of this nanny state we live in, stop letting people believe they have choices and that happiness is linked to the size of their flat screen TV. It isn't, fullstop.

Seems I only find time to Blog when something fires me up enough to stop working 16 hours a day trying to feed people better. I wish we could feed more. We provide school lunches for a school in London but can't for many more simply because we can't do it for the £2 budget that the government sets for the public sector. There are resources out there, only we have to completely change our government policies and educate people if we are going to stand a chance of leaving any legacy other than the present unacceptable one to our children and grandchildren.

Steve

London 18^th August 2009