Selfsufficientish.com

Um, it's not down to the supermarkets, it down to the shoppers.
Supermarkets provide products which people want, if they want straight carrots ( they are easier to peel) thats what they get, at a price.
The thing is it's the truth that actually buying a carrot and peeling it to these people is something to be proud of "look Gary I bought carrots you had to peel for your Tea and everything" normally a microwave meal is what it's all about, which is even further removed, where the lamb has been chopped up, cooked, masked with a sauce, and carrots added on the side all cooked and sliced, and devoid of taste, just for good measure.

I blame the parents.

hm wandering away from the topic at hand but.


unfotunatly it is entierly down to the supermarkets. as ultimatly they decide what is sold to us the punter. if it doesnt sell then its dropped fast.

yes a strait carrot is easier to peel, yes the easy option is to take those ones, and human nature is to do it the easy way. our entire technology is based around making life easier. but the ultimate question is why arnt the curly or purple carrots sold? because they want homoginsed stuff that looks the same. and over decades of this treatment again the punter has grown accustomed to carrots beng arrow strait and orange. ingnoring the hundreds of other varieties. show them a purple one and its like the plauge has returned.



they also decide what is advertised to us as well. the way we select food is artificaly modified.

"be good to yourself".
"its not just food its M&S food"
etc etc when each and every item in the ranges is easily made from scratch in the same time normaly as the ready meal takes to cook in the oven.


is the loaf of warbutons in sainsburys the same as a loaf of warburtons made 50 years ago? is it buggery yet they and the manufacturers sell us the idea that hovis et al make traditional good honest bread not mass produced by the chorely bread method stodge full of chemicals used as industrial agents (not declarable on lable) to make it rise fast, last longer and be fluffy and brilliant white and taste how they have decided bread should taste. instead of the real taste, composition and texture of bread made the proper traditional way without chemical enhancement. a loaf of homemade bread doesnt last long enough to go off its eaten along with the faintly nutty taste that comes with it.

they sell us reheated dough as baked ont he premises. yes it is but its not the same as mixed, kneaded, raised, knockedback an raised again and then baked on the premises. but they sell the idea that its proper stuff


when ready meals were just starting they were sold as a healthy easy option and to be fair in comparision with the actual food around at the time it was pretty much on a par . now however modern ready meals of all types are full of artifical crap for taste when if just made with the basic ingrediants would taste much better. but the modern way saves a few pence per unit if that so we are fed chemicals.

food nd food production is sterilised to the point where kids and adults dont actualy know what is done to grow the food, slaughter/pick it and transport it so its not mushed/rotten and if you dare to highlight what occurs in fishing, slaughter houses, farms to them they are shocked. i have been present in butchers where people didnt want the lamb kileld for a leg of lamb roast.

plus there is the demise of the local food shops which do sell curly carrots, dirty spuds, meat cut from the carcass in house in front of you as you ask for it. not in plastic in nitrogen with oh so special good for you palstered on the lable as it is sloshing around in its own stagnating blood.

far to many people are held at arms length from food production not through any ill will they have been separated from it by years of misleading information, and trust in companies which dont deserve it.

I agree with you.

But it is the consumer that drives choice.

Supermarkets just make money out of it, and I could never see that as a bad thing, in itself. The state of the populations "relationship" with food and farming is a bad thing, but one that is slowly changing.

Your Chemicals rant is out of tune with reality though, our labelling rules are the strictest in Europe by far, and trading standards are very heaviliy involved in ensuring the public are in no way decieved. Indeed recent changes to alergens, QUID regulations, and the last 20 years massive reduction in the number of additives permitted would seem to scream that you are wrong.

As for local shops, well yeah, I used to love the old Video rental shop, you don't see them around any more do you? I wonder why that is? As for those days where every village had a blacksmith and a candle maker, I miss that too, bloody electricity and them damm famgled motor m thingy things, what they called, oh yeah cars.

Nostalgia, looking back fondly at when times were hard, life was rubbish, we all died young, poverty was real, and women and other minorities knew there place, eye' but at least they could suck the blood out of a freshly killed chicken! ( you have to say that in a Yorkshire accent, ala Monty Pythons "you were lucky" sketch)

Paul_C wrote: if it doesnt sell then its dropped fast.

That line says it all. It isnt then the supermarket that makes the decision, it's the consumer.

Hedgie wrote:I went out foraging this morning with my springer spaniel, I collected Hawthorn berries for Haw sauce, and Elder berries for some cordial for my children.
Whilst foraging a lady and her young daughter came down the track that I was on walking her dog. The little girl said what is that man doing, her mum did not reply, I said I am collecting berries to make some juice for my children. As they passed by the girl asked her mum can we collect some berries to make some juice.
The answer she recieved from her mum within my hearing was "No normal people buy it from shops darling"
If foraging makes me not normal then I would rather be labeled thus than be as narrow minded as this woman was.

Excellent, all the more for the rest of us. Long live the snobs.

Zoe

Of course it could have just been misheard. perhaps instead of....

The answer she recieved from her mum within my hearing was "No normal people buy it from shops darling"

If we think of it as "normally people buy it from the shops darling" then we would not be quite so offended, because most of it is shop bought

Hedgie wrote:"No normal people buy it from shops darling"

Hedgie, your (lack of) punctuation makes this sentence true.

Isn't it great to be normal?

My children love foraging and are aware that there are some people that have "issues" with us strange folk. However, my children also know that the beef in their lasagne was grazing in the field opposite our house. That the fluffy sheep that reside in the field behind us are their favourite roast meat and that eggs actually COME OUT OF A CHICKEN SPECIAL BUM! They are so into the real world food as we call it that I get disciplined by them for having to buy jam, chutneys or even ketchup! Now I know thats not normal by modern standards but guess what I dont care!

Forgot to mention the best comment I ever had was from an old woman that actually crossed the road to talk to me:
"I get awfully concerned whenever I walk this road as there's so many of those here and it would be very distressing to see a child getting poisoned."
I showed her the carrier bag full of rose hips (not poisonous berries) and explained that they are delicious and will shortly be made into wine, jam and syrup. he he.

One of the things we did when we lived in the West midlands was to go out as a family in the Autumn and collect haws, hips, rowans and elderberries for winemaking and other preserves. We had so much fun and the walk to the parkland was healthy for us too.
I'm not talking back in the war years, just the late 80's early 90's when it was social suicide for teenagers to be seen in the wrong brand of trainers. I reckon it gave my daughters a sense of perspective and some better values.

Ellendra wrote:I used to be in a larping group that met in one of the best foraging parks in town. It got to be a running joke that I would snack on berries as we roamed the woods. One time a person who had just joined the group saw me pop a berry in my mouth, and launched into a 20-minute lecture on how "many berries are poisonous and you shouldn't just go eating things in the woods". I stood there politely and nodded while my friends, who had been watching me do that for 2 years, were standing behind him laughing their heads off . Eventually he looked around and realized he was missing something, at which point I told him "It's a gooseberry" and walked on.

The group had long since determined that I was not a modern-day human playing an elven ranger 6 hours a weekend, I was an elven ranger who played a modern-day human the other 162 hours a week :)

Reading this just made my day.

welshmum wrote:Forgot to mention the best comment I ever had was from an old woman that actually crossed the road to talk to me:
"I get awfully concerned whenever I walk this road as there's so many of those here and it would be very distressing to see a child getting poisoned."
I showed her the carrier bag full of rose hips (not poisonous berries) and explained that they are delicious and will shortly be made into wine, jam and syrup. he he.

Interesting. I'd expect older people to be more clued up, and remember rosehip syrup (does that still exist?) although my own dad was terrified of anything wild and wouldn't even eat some garlic butter I made with ramsons for fear of being poisoned. It's not so bad in this part of Somerset - adults don't give me evil looks if I forage, though there are teenagers who'd rather die than be seen taking something that doesn't come out of a supermarket . Last month when I was foraging for hazelnuts a man came up to me and told me where there were loads of them lying untouched, so he obviously thought foraging was fine even if he wasn't doing it himself. The depressing bit of this story is that the local people had just been walking over the nuts and smashing them...what's that about then? Their ancestors must have known better. Still, as someone else said, all the more for me.

Unfortunately the crop this year was not as good so we didnt manage to forage them in time. My step mum (59) has such bad memories of the syrup that she wouldnt even try it. But, my family love rosh hip syrup, jam, wine and cordial. The rose hips in question were from a cultivated variety so they were not the usual wild versions that maybe she would of recognised. We also recently found a really vast sloe crop that we still harvesting. Again, we get mixed reactions when the villagers see us doing this. My kids are still young to take what I say as the 'gospel' truth but old enough to appreciate that if we can get something for nothing then go for it. More toys for them.

we were foraging nuts when like you a lady and her child passed by and the child asked "mummy, what are they doing?" "they are collecting nuts" she said. "But mummy, why are they doing that?" "Oh, it's what poor people do...." Hmmm, yet another misseducated child released into the world...........

I often get some funny looks when i go horse poo hunting with my bucket and wellies, but I've got some very happy and lovely scented roses in my garden :)