The idiom “greatest thing since sliced bread” always felt odd for me. I am not a native English speaker; I learned the language when I was already in my teens. And this idiom clashed with the cultural background in which I had grown up. In my opinion, sliced bread is a pretty terrible idea, there’s nothing great about it. When you compare another invention with sliced bread, you are basically saying that this new thing is just as terrible as sliced bread. Here’s the problem: I was raised to not waste food and not spend extra money on packaging and convenience-enhancing processing methods that don’t really save that much time anyway. I mean, sliced bread requires more packaging and it tends to cost a bit more even though for me slicing my own bread only takes a couple of seconds and it is not hard at all.
Firstly, sliced bread must be sold packaged in plastics (and humanity already produces too much plastic waste from packaging). Secondly, at home it must be stored in plastics or else it will dry very quickly. I say “dry,” because good quality bread is supposed to become dry if you fail to eat it in a few days. If bread instead gets covered with mold, then you got ripped off and bought some poor quality loaf of bread. Incidentally, my observation is that sliced bread tends to be poorer quality compared to the whole bread that I prefer to get from small bakeries.
Anyway, if white (either whole grain or refined wheat) bread gets dry, then in Latvian traditional cuisine you use it as an ingredient for meatballs. Here’s how Latvian meatballs (“kotletes”) look like. Ingredients for the recipe are ground meat, eggs, soaked dry wheat bread, and a bit of salt.
Meatballs.
If rye bread gets dry, then you use it for making a bread soup (“maizes zupa” in Latvian). It’s a dessert usually served with whipped cream. You grind the dry rye bread into a powder, mix it with dry fruit like raisins or dried apricots, add some sugar and a few other ingredients and at the end you get a very tasty dessert. In case anybody is interested, here is the recipe. It is in Latvian, but Google translate should do the trick for making it comprehensible.
Bread soup. A Latvian dessert.
Back when I was a child, my mother bought all the fish we ate whole. Not pre-cut into neat fish fillets, but whole with all the bones and organs. My mom always prepared food so as to waste as little of it as possible. Fish heads, bones, and fins were used to make a fish soup. Here’s how fish soup looks like, my mother’s version was usually made from salmon heads, bones, tail, and fins.
Fish soup.
This is how salmon used to be sold in the past.
How salmon ought to be sold.
This is how it is often sold nowadays. Sliced and packaged in a hell lot of plastics.
How salmon is sold in supermarkets.
A few Latvian supermarkets still sell whole fish. But those are rare. Most grocery stores sell only pre-cut fish that is packaged in lots of plastics. Moreover, these stores sell only what are considered the most desirable cuts. Fish heads, tails, fins, and bones are not found anywhere in the grocery store at all. Parts of the animal are simply no longer sold for human consumption. Nowadays, the local farmers’ market is pretty much the only place where consumers can still get the ingredients for a fish soup. Well, technically you can also make a fish soup also from the fancy cuts, but really, the recipe works better with fish heads.
Most offal is edible and fit for human consumption. Pig feet, animal cartilage, hearts, kidneys, tongues, liver, pig snouts, bone marrow, animal skins, etc. organ meats are all edible.
This is food. Perfectly suitable for human consumption.
What do you do with pig feet? You cook and eat them. By the way, I have at least tried various foods made from most organs. My favorite are pig feet. They are really delicious.
A liver dish with apples.
Braised pork kidney.
A veal testicle stew. I’d say it looks tasty. The recipe can be found here.
Bone soup.
And here’s a food my mother cooks on a regular basis. A soup made from animal bones. Basically, you buy some bones and boil them until the meat becomes tender and can be easily removed from the bones. Next, you add some vegetables to the soup. By the way, bone marrow is also edible.
A beef steak.
Here is an actual food sold in a Latvian grocery store. In my opinion, this looks ridiculous. A huge amount of plastics around a small piece of meat.
“Centrāltirgus.” A market in Riga.
Personally, I prefer to get my meats from this place. Of course, I am not arguing that I want to be able to buy a whole cow—I’d have no clue what to do with it anyway. But I do want to buy my food without excessive packaging. More importantly, I also want to be able to buy all the pieces of the animal. Not only a steak and some ground beef, but also all the skins, bones, and organs. The pesky problem is that the overwhelming majority of grocery stores simply do not sell any organ meats whatsoever. At all. For example, beef tongue is considered a delicacy in Latvia. Nonetheless, supermarkets do not sell it, because it is a rarity and only a few people know how to cook it and would be interested in purchasing some beef tongues. (By the way, beef tongues are tasty. I am speaking from personal experience.)
Baltic herrings.
Here’s one of my favorite foods. Baltic herrings. I bought these in the market, because, of course, grocery stores never sell them. These fish are tiny, they are also very cheap (I paid 0.80 euros per kilogram for the ones in this photo). Some people consider them cat food. My dogs consider them dog food. I however, consider them my food, and I am rather annoyed that I can buy these fish only in select few locations. Actually, I know about only one place where I can get these fish—the local farmers’ market.
And here’s my lunch from last week. Pan fried herrings, boiled beans, tomatoes, and dills. My dogs got the fish heads and bones.
And here’s the underlying problem—the society has progressed to the point that some perfectly edible foods are no longer considered fit for human consumption or sold in places where the average person is likely to buy their food. This is wrong. This is wasteful. Producing animal foods creates more environmental harm than producing plant foods. If we insist upon eating animals, at the very least we should eat the whole animal and not just some select few parts of it.
Dietary guidelines for Americans usually tell people to eat lean meats like, for example, skinless chicken breast. You know what, skinless chicken breasts do not grow on trees. In order to produce them, you have to grow an entire animal. “Eat skinless chicken” is just a fucking euphemism for “throw the skin in the garbage bin.”
The underlying idea behind advising people to eat lean meats is to reduce the saturated fat consumption. In general, scientists and dieticians recommend people to consume less than 10% of all their daily calories from saturated fat. But come on, it’s not like we need to throw out animal skins and fat in order to reach this objective, instead we can also reduce our saturated fat intake by, gasp, eating fewer animal foods.
As for convenience, human desire to buy foods that require as little preparing and cooking as possible only further exacerbates the problem. Consider fish, for example. When you get a whole fish, in order to make some fish soup, you have to cut the fish, place it in a pot, boil it for a while, remove edible flesh from the bones. Of course, buying a fish fillet that is already free of bones and entrails is more convenient and faster. I get why some people like it. But the result is also more wasteful. Besides, some amazingly tasty dishes require a bit of effort to make them. But they are tasty. So the time investment is worth it. And everybody should be capable of slicing bread. It literally takes only a few seconds. I cannot comprehend why sliced bread became so popular. (Personally, I still buy my bread non-sliced. I also buy whole fish from the farmers’ market whenever possible.)
I think for somebody who has lengthy posts about how neurotypical people just take their point of view and experience for granted and normal while failing to consider other possibilities you sure do fall into that same trap here.
I think we generally agree that we should waste less food and produce less packing, yet you completely ignore that for many people those nice “worth the effort” dishes are not an option.
First of all, re-read your own text and count the times you tell us that your mother puts in all the thought and effort top prepare those dishes. As you apparently do cook yourself at least sometimes you should be aware of the amount of work that takes and you do realise that those dishes that use the whole animal etc. are more time consuming, yet you assume that everybody has the time to prepare them.
It’s no miracle why suddenly everybody is making their own bread. It’s not because shops have stopped selling bread, but because it takes time and effort people usually don’t have. You also seem to assume that everybody is young and able bodied, because “everybody should be capable of slicing bread”.
When my grandparents still lived they’d buy their whole loaf and pass it on to us who then sliced it up. Not everybody has their kids live in the same house. Which is another point: kids can take out a slice of bread and make themselves a sandwich very early, but they cannot be trusted with a huge breadknife.
While the pics of food were wonderful and all that looks tasty, your whole post is poorly thought out, condescending and ableist.
Wow! Don’t get down because of Gileill. My household does most of these things, but we don’t eat pork–too smart to be a food source, and we don’t eat liver/kidney–processing factories of toxins. We do utilize every part of what we get, I have in the past butchered my own animals and utilized everything we can, although in the last 3 years we have transitioned to a mostly plant based diet. We make our own bread–it is super cheap and super easy, anyone who says otherwise hasn’t tried/researched how to do so. One of my first purchases before the lockdown (assuming it was coming) was a bunch of rice, flour, and jars of yeast. I also have started my own seeds for my garden, and have grown enough seeds to give plants to my students’ families as well. I doubt Gileill had the foresight to do something like this, nor the consideration for others’ needs beyond (her?) own. If anyone seems elitist, it is she.
Giliell @#1
A minority of human population cannot slice bread for themselves. Therefore 99% of all the bread in grocery stores must be sold sliced and packaged in a ridiculous amount of plastics.
A minority of the human population cannot slice their own salmon. Therefore 100% of all the salmon sold in grocery stores must be sliced and packaged in plastics.
Some people don’t have enough free time to make soup from fish heads or beef bones. Therefore it must be impossible for the rest of the humanity to purchase these ingredients.
Is this the argument you try to make here? If no, then what’s your problem? I never argued that I want to ban sales of sliced bread or sliced salmon. I argued that these products should not be 100% of what’s available for sale in the average grocery store.
If you like to buy sliced bread, I am not suggesting to ban these products from grocery stores. You are welcome to eat whatever the hell you like. I respect your food preferences and I never argued that your favorite food should disappear from grocery stores.
Instead, I argued that I want to be able to buy organ meats, bones, whole fish, etc. food ingredients. In case you haven’t noticed, these foods actually have disappeared from the overwhelming majority of grocery stores.
If I want to make a soup from fish bones, it should be my choice. It’s not up to you to tell me that I cannot cook whatever foods I like.
Moreover, for somebody who claims to think about minority interests, you seem blissfully ignorant about the fact that some people cannot afford the fancy packaged foods. Sliced and packaged salmon costs about 30 euros per kilogram in Latvia. Whole salmon costs about 7 euros per kilogram. Fancy beef steak in lots of plastics costs about 15 euros per kilogram in Latvia. Various organ meats and bones can be as cheap as 0.80 euros per kilogram. Large fancy expensive fish start at about 6 euros per kilogram. Baltic herrings cost only 0.80 euros per kilogram. Why the fuck do you think my mother made so many organ meat dishes for me when I was a child? Because she was a single poor mother working for minimum wage who couldn’t possibly afford to buy the fancy meat and fish cuts.
In case you haven’t noticed, modern grocery stores are not friendly for poor people. These stores simply do not sell numerous nutritious and cheap foods as well as the ingredients that can be used for cooking cheap food. For example, most Latvian grocery stores sell fancy breakfast muesli for about 8 euros per kilogram. Yet very few grocery stores sell wheat/oat/rye bran.
Moreover, I mentioned my mother’s recipes, because she taught them to me. Nowadays I prepare my own food.
You like conveniently packaged food? Whatever, that’s none of my business. But have you noticed that all this conveniently packaged food that’s ready to use is fucking expensive? Seriously, you should try to compare the prices per kilogram. Convenience is fucking expensive. If you can afford such foods, great for you. But many people (like me) cannot afford them.
For example, do you know how much a frozen pizza costs (I mean price per kilogram or price per kcal)? And do you know how much you have to pay if instead you cook your own pizza from scratch? Flour is dirt cheap, eggs and vegetables are more pricey but not that expensive. For meat instead of bacon you can use organ meats. If you cook your own pizza, it will be a lot cheaper than the frozen ready-made ones from the grocery store. And the difference in price is immense (at least in Latvian prices, I admit that while living in Germany I never even looked at how much frozen pizzas cost there, but in Latvia they cost about 6 euros per kilogram).
When you don’t have much money and you must spend on food as little as possible, you will search for all those cheap cuts and organ meats. In my case, whenever I go grocery shopping, I must walk 3 kilometers to the farmers’ market simply because all those grocery stores that are next to my home do not sell the cheap food ingredients.
rhebel @#2
Cool.
I, instead, got various grains like rolled oats, buckwheat, and whole grain barley flakes.
By the way, breakfast muesli costs about 8 euros per kilogram in Latvia. Rolled oats are only 0.80 euros per kilogram. Besides, when you make your own breakfast porridge, the recipe is endlessly adjustable and variable.
Yep, I do this as well. When it comes to growing my own food, I prefer to grow the expensive foods. For example, potatoes cost only 0.40 euros per kilogram, thus for me it is not worth growing them. Blueberries, however, cost 8 euros per kilogram. Thus I am growing those. I mostly grow my own berries and some fruit trees. And also green peas. Legume prices in Latvia are interesting. Some are really cheap (thus not worth growing for me) while others are really expensive. Fresh green peas cost about 4 euros per kilogram in Latvia, thus I am growing them for myself.
As I was reading your post I was remembering I used to think food was so simple and cheap to cook yourself, and that there should be more food available for poor people in grocery stores – and I still do think that, but after talking to some truly poor people I changed my mind about why and how.
Truly poor people don’t have a refrigerator. They don’t have a freezer. They may not even have a stove. With no refrigerator, you can’t cook some delicious fish head soup and keep the left overs for later. You can’t freeze them either, with no freezer. In fact you might not even be able to cook it all because you don’t have a stove, or if you do, you can’t afford the fuel to run it. Such people are actually forced to try and survive on fast food (which does not seem like food to me but I’m a little more fortunate and can cook for myself) or some other pre-packaged thing. And now imagine trying to go to the store on the bus, or walking there, with a baby and a toddler. You’re not going to pick out bones to take home because they’re heavy… and I have to say that until I met and knew some truly poor people, that consideration never crossed my mind, because even when I did not have a car I also did not have any children.
To your point about using up a whole animal I whole-heartedly agree, I raise my own and we absolutely eat everything we can, but I can also see that truly poor people simply can’t buy an entire salmon. They have no way to process it once they get home and no way to store the excess for later. It would absolutely be cheaper, but if you have to carry your groceries while you walk home, while also carrying a baby and taking care of a toddler, I can understand that a person might make other choices.
The other thing for poor people is time: I am not just guessing here, both my sister and I have fallen into this category in the past, and we both worked multiple jobs to try and make ends meet. That means no time at all for cooking.
There is the point that rich people are increasingly fussy about their food and what it looks like, and we increasingly are distancing ourselves from the natural world, This makes many people feel squeamish about such things as beef tongue (which is a fantastic dish) and so due to that, it’s not offered in stores. This may also be because truly poor people simply can’t buy beef tongue as they have no way to cook or store it, so there is no demand.
To sum up, I agree that there is too much waste and too much packaging, but it’s a complex issue. I would argue that the first thing we need to do is not to put organ meats in grocery stores, but to improve social and financial equality so that there are not people out there with no refrigerator and no car, having to care for small children by themselves. And when I think about the homeless I can hardly speak.
kestrel @#5
Situation in Latvia differs from what you are describing. Unless a person is actually homeless, they have a stove. Apartments without stoves do not exist here.
I can theoretically imagine not having a fridge, though. Granted, given how it is possible to get a somewhat cheap fridge second hand, I suspect it is rare. Besides, people who live in rural areas almost always have naturally cold underground storage space. And in winter you can just keep stuff outside.
Anyway, in a farmer’s market it is possible to buy also fish that are cut in parts. For example, you can get half of a fish. A single fish head would be enough for a pot of soup that can be stored in room temperature for two days. Just make a pot of soup, keep it in kitchen for two days while you are having soup in every meal (we do that in my family).
Moreover, fast food is comparatively very expensive in Latvia. We don’t have a McDonalds on every corner, and their meals are pricey.
By the way, there exist shopping bags on wheels if you don’t own a car (as I do).
Yes, most poor people work multiple jobs for minimum wage, so time is a problem. That being said, many cheap foods can be prepared in just a few minutes. For example, buy some rolled oats (0.80 euros per kilogram), pour water or milk on them, wait for three minutes, and your breakfast is done. Entering a fast food restaurant for breakfast wouldn’t be faster. Alternatively, you cook a pot of soup during the weekends and eat it for the rest of the week.
Sure, what you are proposing would be great, but I don’t expect it to actually happen. Just look at the politicians we have. In the mean time, while we wait for a miracle to happen, I want grocery shops to carry not only fancy breakfast muesli that costs 8 euros per kilogram but also some cheap grain bran. And I also want some cheap organ meats and Baltic herrings for 0.80 euros per kilogram.
Of course, I understand that there exist poor people whose situation is exactly what you describe. But there also exist poor people whose situations are different from your description. You cannot claim that my own experience of growing up in poverty didn’t happen or that it is not representative. Sure, it probably differs from what poor people experience in the USA, but it was pretty similar to what most poor people experience in Latvia. “Put cheap food ingredients in stores” is a solution that would help poor people in the kind of situation as what my mother experienced two decades ago.
By the way, for those who are homeless or cannot cook for themselves, we have soup kitchens in the city where I live. I imagine something similar must exist also in your part of the world, right?
Andreas I hope you are not comparing the price of loose fresh salmo with packaged smoked salmon, that would not be a reasonable comparison to make as there is a lot of work in producing smoked salmon.
What supermarkets in the UK sell varies between the different groups, but isn’t dependant on anything obvious to me, thus I can get marrow bones and pork or lamb kidney and liver in both Waitrose -posh – and Morrisons -not posh – the latter also often has pig’s feet. Neither do beef liver or kidney that I’ve seen except for in a steak and kidney mix. Both have fresh meat and fish counters as well as packed meat and fish, and whether you get the whole fish or part of it mostly depends on the size of the fish , the smaller ones come whole, but the fish counter staff will fillet them if you so desire, larger fish don’t usually come whole, but you could order, say a whole salmon, if you wanted that much.
As for the sliced bread, I think if you are used to buying traditionally made bread you may not realise how difficult it is to slice up bread made using the Chorley Wood Process *spit*, it is so soft and squishy that cutting a reasonably shaped and sized slice by hand is hard. When they machine slice it the machine does more than hold the loaf, it lightly compresses it so that the loaf maintains it’s shape while being cut. Since I’ve been ill I do buy more bread than I make and have learnt to be very careful about what I buy as some uncut loaves from Morrisons are impossible to cut a sensible slice from, even with the very good bread knife I own.
I don’t disagree with your contention that food is over packaged, nor that we should eat more than the prime cuts, however Giliell does have a point. If you want to donate to a food bank in the UK you are asked to remember that some of the people using the food bank do not have a stove, if they are lucky they have a microwave and a kettle, the less lucky may just have access to a kettle. While theoretically you can cook most things in a microwave you really can’t do things like making a large pan of stock from fish or meat trimmings. If you don’t have a knife and chopping board what you can cook becomes very limited. Sadly in the UK it is also true that if you are really short of cash it is actually cheaper to get the calories you and your children need with cheap packets of crisps and biscuits than from cooking using fresh ingredients, especially if you live in a food desert and have time constraints preventng you accessing the buget supermarkets.
I was on the dole back in the eighties and didn’t have a fridge, it wasn’t considered “essential” by the DHSS (Department of Health and Social Security as it was back then), if the place I was living hadn’t had a cooker I could have got a grant to buy one, but not a fridge. Since then social security has become a lot less “generous”, if you need something like a cooker you may get a loan to be paid back out of your already inadequate Universal Credit (hah). In many British cities there is not enough housing at a price people on Universal Credit can afford, so we end up with whole families living in one room; they may have access to a kitchen shared with other families in similar straights, but not always. There will be no where to store food safely in the kitchen or the family everything room. I could go on, but it is just too depressing.
Jazzlet @#7
Nope, I am talking about the price per kilogram of completely raw salmon that has been cut, sliced, and packaged in plastics versus a whole fish. Slicing your own fish isn’t hard, it only takes several minutes and requires no complicated cooking skills.
I Latvia, people usually eat salmon raw, you just slice it and put it on bread. I have seen smoked salmon for sale here, but it is pretty rare.
I have been able to slice all kinds of breads, from squishy white bread to really hard large loafs of rye bread. I hate producing plastic waste, so I avoid buying anything that’s packaged in plastics whenever possible.
In Latvia everybody who isn’t homeless has a stove. Microwaves and kettles however are items owned only by people who can afford to buy stuff. Personally, I own neither a microwave nor a kettle (I heat water in a pot on my stove). My own stove/oven is a 40+ years old antiquity. My family got it for free, because its previous owner just threw it out.
Are there no second hand stores where you live? Here getting a used knife and a cutting board would be very easy.
Oddly enough, various foods made from sugar are expensive in Latvia. I have never seen cookies costing less than 3 euros per kilogram. Potatoes, carrots, and cabbage are about 0.50 euros per kilogram (price depends on the season). Most grains are less than 1 euro per kilogram. Various organ meats and the cheapest fish are between 0.80 and 2 euros per kilogram. Apples are between 0.60 and 1.50 euros per kilogram depending on where they are produced. Back when I was a child, sugary foods were extremely expensive and my mother hardly ever gave them to me. Nowadays, they have gotten more affordable, but sugary goods are still much more expensive than real food here.
I’m not sure the “convenience” foods you pointed out are simply wasting the animal products. Sure, there is a lot of waste in the excess packaging involved, I fully agree on that. But I believe when they butcher an animal in a commercial facility, very little is wasted, a lot of the stuff we don’t directly purchase gets turned into other products. We’ve all seen the fuss over “pink slime” a few years back, and then I believe a lot of other “scraps” get used for animal food, both consumer pet food, an industrial animal food.
As to sliced bread… I grew up in a household that ate entirely homemade bread, and despite all the practice, nobody else could cut a straight and even slice off of a loaf to save their life. Then there is the issue of the knife used to cut bread. A lot of people fail to sharpen their knives, and just end up sawing through things with a dull serrated knife, which just makes a mess. I don’t really mind, but I keep an okay edge on my chef’s knife, and can use it to cut a pretty even and clean slice off of a loaf.
I haven’t quite been fully destitute, but I’ve never really been comfortable/secure financially either. I’ve often been short on time, and when I consider the time spent cooking, cleaning, prepping food, and acquiring food, it’s hard for me to beat take out. Not only is it not that much more expensive than whatever raw ingredients I can acquire, but it generally tastes a lot better, and saves me a lot of time and effort. That’s probably more of a failure on my part, as I am definitely not very skilled at cooking. I’m perfectly capable of heating food to kill parasites and pathogens, but not that great at producing something tasty.
lochaber @#10
Sure, other products like fertilizer or cow food that caused cows to get the mad cow disease. Cat and dog food at least makes sense, though. Still, we live in a society in which poorer people do not have access to enough nutritious food, especially quality protein. Nonetheless, we refuse to sell them the organ meats and instead we remove these materials from human consumption and turn them into plant fertilizer instead.
Selling expensive and highly profitable foods is more appealing for people who manage grocery stores, therefore cheap foods simply disappear from the shop shelves.
Do people actually care about having straight and pretty slices? I never cared. Regardless of how uneven my bread slices are, they are just as edible.
I was planning to post my favorite recipe for a bone soup in a future blog post. I guess I won’t do this after all. From the responses in the comment section it looks like nobody’s interested. Oh well.
I am very used to being told that a person like me cannot exist. Usually people say that a person with my gender identity cannot possibly exist.
This is the first time that people tell me that a person with my financial situation cannot exist. Somebody must be either so wealthy that they want premium pre-cut foods ready to use and wrapped in lots of plastics that cost a fortune or they are so poor that they do not own a stove, cannot cook, and need ready-made food from fast food outlets. This time being told that I do not exist is actually funny.
On top of that, everybody’s either disabled, too old, too young, or too busy to be interested in buying cheaper food that hasn’t been pre-cut and packaged in plastics. Nor can anybody be possibly interested in cooking offal, thus such foods shouldn’t even be placed on grocery store shelves.
Oh well, the climate will get totally fucked anyway, so at this point we might as well use all the plastic packaging we can possibly produce. What’s the point of even trying to improve something… And once the climate crashes poor people will starve to death anyway, so what’s the point of even trying to let them purchase affordable protein foods right now.
Oh yeah, and the Sun will stop shining after several billion years, so every way in which humans attempt to improve their lives (or their nutrition, or their plastic usage habits) are ultimately futile anyway.
Let’s just turn organ meats into plant fertilizer, let’s produce as much plastic packaging as we possibly can, and the poor people might as well live without protein in their diets if they cannot afford to purchase premium steaks and fillets that are conveniently pre-cut and ready to use. Or they can eat soy proteins, never mind that soy foods are a rare novelty that actually costs even more than offal.
And if somebody happens to have a stove and knows how to cook, then they have no right to call themselves “poor,” which means that they must buy the premium-priced cuts. If a person could afford to buy a used second hand stove for 10 euros, then they certainly can also afford to buy premium steak cuts for 15 euros per kilogram. After all, there’s no way somebody might possibly be interested in using their antique 40+ years old stove that they got from the garbage container for cooking a pot of bone soup.
And even if eating offal could reduce the overall amount of livestock humans produce, it is still not worth suggesting, because who gives a shit about this planet. Besides, even making such a suggestion is ableist, because a small percentage of humanity cannot cook due to being disabled. It’s not like a significant portion of humanity can cook and could eat offal, so it cannot be possible for a blogger to talk about such people. A blogger cannot possibly suggest able-bodied people who own stoves that they might try cooking some tasty offal dishes and buy less foods packaged in plastics, because such a suggestion ignores the existence of disabled people and people who don’t own stoves.
rhebel
Fun fact: Giliell does have a well-stocked fridge, freezer and larder. Giliell didn’t only have the space, but also the means to do so in preparation of the pandemic. She also knows a lot of poor people who couldn’t and who usually have to rely on now closed foodbanks.
Andreas
Wow, you are throwing a temper tantrum.
Nobody denied your experience, you simply failed to consider anybody else’s experience. You keep arguing that things are easy and doable and whatnot, because you can do it or your mum could do it. You are the one assuming that everybody else’s lived experience is invalid, that people just don’t know how to make a fish soup and if they did, they would just do it your way.
Anyway, I’m done here, because I really don’t have the energy to carefully explain things to you.
Giliell @#13
In this blog post I addressed the following problems:
(1) Humans use a lot of single use plastic packaging. We wrap in plastics everything, from sliced bread to single pieces of meat (harmful for the climate and birds who swallow this plastic trash);
(2) Humans inefficiently utilize parts of the cattle we raise. Offal is perfectly edible and fit for human consumption, yet instead of eating it we make plant fertilizer from it. This inefficiency results in more cattle being raised in order to provide the same amount of animal protein for human consumption (harmful for the climate).
(3) Humans intentionally remove cheap foods like offal or grain bran from the food supply thus artificially inflating the food prices. Thus a cheap and nutritious source of protein becomes inaccessible for those who would like to buy and eat it (in general those would be people who are interested in spending less money on food).
During the last few decades cheaper and unpackaged foods have disappeared from shop shelves, they have been substituted with more expensive (and more profitable for the store owner) packaged and processed foods. I proposed trying to reverse this trend. I also proposed that people who can cook their own food could substitute some of their meat or fish meals with offal in order to reduce the overall demand for premium cuts.
Nowhere in my blog post did I propose banning the sale of any items. I never said that people who cannot cook due to disabilities or not owning a stove or whatever other reason should be forbidden from buying ready-made foods. Do you need a disclaimer for everything? Can’t you use some common sense while reading? Disclaimer: “If you are disabled or cannot cook, then this blog post isn’t meant for you.” Do you seriously ask for this? You, a person who publishes recipes in your own blog posts?
For example, your last blog post about baking a cake features the following words: “bake a 160° with ventilation.” If I were sarcastic, I could argue that this is insensitive, because you failed to keep in mind that some people (like me) still own 40+ years old ovens that have neither temperature control nor ventilation, because they are too poor to buy a new fancy oven. If you dislike what I said in this blog post, then you should stop having double standards and you also might as well never write a blog post about foods you love without a long list of disclaimers that makes it absolutely obvious that you aren’t forgetting about disabled, poor, busy, young, or old people who are unable to make the foods you talked about. Of course, that would be ridiculous. Just like I consider your current criticisms ridiculous.
By the way, I have been thinking about writing a blog post about how people should use private cars less often and switch to bicycles. I guess I will need to preface that blog post with a disclaimer especially for Giliell: “If you are disabled and cannot use a bicycle, then the suggestions in this post do not apply to you.”
If you don’t give a fuck about food waste, or plastic packaging, then just go on and use the damn things. I am not a policeman stopping you from trashing the planet. Arguing against people who don’t give a shit about plastic waste, food waste, or rising and artificially inflated food prices feels really depressing for me, and right now I am seriously not enjoying our conversation. Moreover, when somebody starts using the existence of minorities like disabled people as an excuse for why also everybody else should feel free to unnecessarily trash the planet, then that is even more annoying for me. Just go on and keep on throwing plastics in your oversized garbage bin, you don’t have to inform me about how you desperately want to do this. I will be happier if I don’t read about your love for single use plastic packaging.
Poverty is a complicated problem. There is no simple single solution. There is no solution that can easily solve rather than just improve things. There is no solution that will work for everybody. I am aware that people’s situations differ.
If I suggest that lower income people could have more nutritious meals if grocery stores offered for sale various cheap and nutritious foods like grain bran and organ meats, then the correct response to this proposal isn’t: “It’s useless, because it won’t work for everybody, after all, some poor people don’t have stoves.” Duh, of course, there is no single solution that will work for everybody. But if some simple to implement proposal can help at least a few people get a more nutritious diet (and also reduce food waste and packaging waste), then this solution is worth implementing.
Nor did I ever say that you or some other person specifically must eat this or that food. It’s not up to me to police other people’s diets and their choices aren’t my business. But I do think that I should consider myself free to recommend my favorite recipes for delicious meals. If you can recommend recipes for baked goods, why can’t I recommend a recipe for stewed veal testicles? You don’t like my suggestion? Oh well, it’s not like I ever tried any of your cake recipes either. Sometimes people’s food preferences differ. That’s normal.
At the very least, the humanity shouldn’t intentionally hinder people’s ability to purchase cheap foods like organ meats or grain bran. Those people who can cook those ingredients and want to use them should have an opportunity to purchase them. Intentionally removing cheap ingredients from grocery store shelves harms some people who feel that they have limited income and would be interested in cooking foods from cheap ingredients. Never mind the environmental impact of generating more food waste and plastic packaging.
I hate it when people end a text with this statement. If you are done, then don’t post a comment at all.
I grew up when meat from the butcher’s shop (not the supermarket) was still wrapped in paper. After we took it home, the paper would go in the fireplace. I don’t have the stomach (figuratively or literally) to eat every part of an animal, but I will buy whole if it’s available simply because it’s cheaper (e.g. whole uncooked chickens; feathers, head and intestines removed). Fish markets here still sell the uncut animals, often still alive in water.
Few places in Asian countries (at least, where I’ve seen it) sell beef or pork in large pieces. If I want a two kilogram piece of beef, I have to go to the supermarket at 8-9am and try to explain before they cut up the sides of beef and wrap it in plastic. Meats here are usually cut up into thin slices for shabu shabu, cooking your own food in broth on the table. I hate that style of cooking. The notion of roasting large pieces in the oven or as a steak is foreign to them.
I am fortunate that at the local bakery that I frequent, bread is available as you like it. Thick sliced, thin sliced, unsliced. They do it on the machine behind the counter. Sometimes I get a crusty loaf and cut it myself. Mostly I get thin sliced because it goes further per loaf than my best attempts at cutting bread with my carefully sharpened bread knife. I sharpened it with a chainsaw file and it’s quite dangerously sharp if someone unskilled uses it. Luckily there are no fools in my house. Friends I’ve visited have utterly unsuitable bread knives which can only cut the hardest bread. Empty bread bags get recycled at local supermarkets who have special collection points for soft plastics. I haven’t the faintest idea where they end up, could be land fill, don’t know.
I don’t usually criticise other people’s choice of food purchasing because you can never know their personal reasons. IMHO the people most guilty of crimes against the planet are the owners of giant supermarket chains that demand all foods to be sold in bar coded packets for easy stock control. I suspect that very few places have thriving independent shops these days so most people are stuck with buying pre packaged processed stuff. I consider myself more fortunate than most, living where giant supermarkets aren’t the sole choice of food supply.
Andreas, I humbly suggest that you continue to write about what you find interesting and don’t take criticism too personally. I’m not a prolific commenter but do enjoy the variety of opinion on freethought blogs. Yours is one of the blogs I check every day. Cheers.
Speaking for myself I in no way was trying to claim you should not exist or have your experiences, I was simply adding my own experiences in the hope of having an interesting conversation. To me it was a good topic. I completely understand if you don’t want other people’s perspectives.
Your comments brought back some good memories. My grandmother used to make meatballs the same way, although I don’t remember if she soaked the bread first on not, (my heritage is Italian). My mother eventually went to bread crumbs– easier and more consistent texture. She often made these herself by buying day-old Italian bread and letting it get stale, then crushing it into crumbs. We had a lot of good bakeries around where you could buy still-warm crusty Italian bread; (the shit supermarkets try to pass off as Italian doesn’t even qualify as bread). My father used to love pig’s feet, (or pig’s knuckles as we sometimes called them), and my grandmother loved tripe, although the smell of it cooking used to drive me out of the house. She used to tell me how, when my great- grandfather was alive, they would buy live chickens and kill them in the cellar. The mental picture of a headless chicken running around the cellar always cracked me up. On xmas eve my father would go down to the pier and buy fresh lobster which my mother would stuff with breadcrumbs and spices and cook in homemade tomato sauce. On Sundays, we always had macaroni or ravioli, both also homemade. Boy, those were the days! Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
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Supermarkets don’t do this to spite you, or to take away your choices. It just doesn’t stack up for them financially to stock this kind of food under the current circumstances.
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You have just described how you get all that nice unpackaged non-supermarket-sold stuff easily and cheaply at the market. Which is precisely where everyone who wants these things goes to get them — people who know how to cook these things are also clever enough to buy them fresh and cheap. Market stalls do this in a very limited and predictable time window. Get the fresh stuff in in bulk, you have a wide range in a reasonably narrow niche, the clientele who wants your niche knows when and where to come to get it, when you’re out or the time is up you close shop and are finished for the next few days.
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In contrast, the the main feature of supermarkets is that they’re open and fully stocked a large part of the day, most days of the week. The planning and just-in-time logistics of selling fresh food without serious waste is non-trivial and quite expensive compared to food that can be stored for at least a week. The more different items you have, the trickier and costlier it gets.
It’s simply not worth it for the number of customers who’d buy this kind of stuff and haven’t already done so at the market.
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It’s not worth it for most people to pay the kind of price a supermarket would charge for fresh food without shelf-life extending packaging, so it’s not worth it for supermarkets to stock it. Just like it’s not worth it for market stalls to sell the wide range of non-perishable items that work really well for supermarkets.
Just go to the right shop for each and no need to complain. After all, you’re not complaining either that your supermarket doesn’t sell chainsaws and the hardware store doesn’t sell cheese.