Food for thought

http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20101118/BUSINESS/11180324/Farm-slices-up-squash-but-not-the-profits

This is the sort of story that gives you a warm glow. Not just because it's a good story about seasonal good food, consumed either at a communal table with family and friends during a special meal, or alone in front of the tee vee, or just as a vegetable offset to a mainly meat treat or even, if you're in a hurry, blitzed in a blender to constitute a soup to cut out all that tedious chewing. No, it's because it corrects a misconception and you finish the article knowing the world is a little bit better than you thought it was when you started.

Thanks to the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, I thought that isolated farms in upstate New York were used exclusively for strange rituals, inbreeding and the odd genetic experiment gone horribly wrong (which I guess is more inbreeding). Not so, it would appear that innovation lurks in the woods and fields, as well as vegetables.

Or maybe it's just me. I've always had a problem with excessive food packaging. I can't see why you need the skills of a safecracker to get into a bag of spuds. And as for vegetables presented in cardboard trays with plastic lids, what the hell is going on there? Unless the avocado in question is gold plated, it's just not justified.

Most fruit and vegetable come in their own packaging, which you scrape off anyway, then boil the contents to buggery to make sure you remove any pesky vitamins. This packaging nonsense is the fault of supermarkets who all think that their customers are elderly spinsters that must be protected at all costs from a vegetable that is even slightly misshapen - because nature likes a laugh and misshapen vegetables always, but always, look like willies. Even the sprouts.

So the packaging protects the precious product. I think the World Gone Mad moment was when a supermarket sold slices of apple sealed in a plastic bag. Possibly this was designed for children who were not to be trusted to slice up fruit themselves and who were too stupid to work out that apples do not need to be sliced for consumption, they can be chewed, gnawed, bitten and chomped. An apple is the perfect fruit for eating on the go, it is perfectly sized to fit in one hand and it even comes in it's own edible wrapper. Putting it in a bag is not an improvement.

Which led me to believe that placing vegetables in plastic bags was a bad thing.

Not so, it would appear. And now I get it. Not everyone is as lucky as me, with a council that will provide you with a free compost bin for your kitchen waste, bits of chopped up garden, grass cuttings, the occasional fox corpse and of course any contraband you want to keep hidden and away from the house (fun fact trivia fans, glossy magazines featuring 'art' portraits may take a while to compost, but compost they do, so don't leave them in there for long or Miss August will have turned to mulch).

There is, it would appear, a lot of a vegetable that people don't use. There's the peel, which is disposed of, and the seeds, which are normally not eaten either. So all of this just gets thrown away, composted at best, landfill at worst. The idea that all this waste is somehow put to good news is fantastic.

Turning the peelings into animals feed and so on is great for a number of reasons. The first is that, of course, if you feed your animals on good stuff, they will taste even better by the time they fulfill their destiny, which may be to become a mascot of a sports team or state and travel the country before being retired to a life of standing in a field wondering where all the glitter cannons went, but is, let’s face it, a lot more likely to involve gravy and a slide of fries.

And let’s not gloss over the animal feed part – I long to see the advert where two cattle are tucking into a trough and one says to the other ‘Good squash today’, his friend replying ‘Not just squash…Martin Farms squash.’ Then the tag line ‘Martins Farms squash…a natural source of starch’. Read by either James Earl Jones or Christoper Walken, I’m not sure yet. This would cause people like me to instantly panic that I was not getting enough starch, hitherto something I thought was only used in laundry, and to rush out and panic buy squash.

EDIT

Once you’re done with the pith, and the peel, and the flesh has been sent off to be packaged and distributed, you’re left with the seed. Now, you’re a farmer. You have seed. What’s the obvious thing to do…that’s right, press those bad boys and extract oil from them. After the frankly disappointing discovery that you can’t run the tractor on it comes the revelation that you can, however, cook with it.

EDIT

But bottling the oil and flogging it in artisan food shops to folk who want to cook their veg in something a little more exotic than olive oil is genius. The trick to the marketing is to make it four times as expensive as the thing it is replacing and put a rustic label on it, then try not to grin yourself inside out as you start making a profit from something you used to throw away! Not only that, it ticks all the boxes of cooking because nobody knows a damn about the nutritional content! Is it healthy, like some television nutritionists bark at me to be? Is it rich and tasty, like television chefs bark at me to be? As long as I’m still taking instructions from the television it’s a case of sod it, it’s over seven bucks a bottle, it must be good, I’ll have some.