Lester Brown

Attended an incredibly thought provoking lecture at Compassion in World Farming by Lester R Brown on Thursday.

You can listen to it here: http://www.ciwf.org.uk/news/factory_farming/lecture_2009_lester_brown.aspx

Grab a coffee, take time out and listen..... Really interested in what anyone thinks.

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.