HERE'S TO NEXT MONDAY

                                          Home made beef burgers,made with steak mince.

Now we begin the final countdown,exactly one week today my son will have ,a long last parted company with what I can only describe as a company with a death wish!

He is , to all intents and purposes jumping ship before its inept bridge crew steer it on to the rocks,an event as certain as the sunrise.

I have my own reasons for wishing him far away from his present environment,I am actually itching for him to be gone!Those reasons must,for now be entirely my own.

My siege which the latest plague is, I hope nearing its end for although I slept ,not at all, the morning found me lest incline to cough and to sneeze my brain in to the next Parish!

Our two cats are,while not exactly matey becoming accustomed to each others presence and peace reigns once more. Apart from the occasional bout of swearing the two seem to have accepted the inevitable......now we will wait and see what happens when the expected kittens arrive.

I feel obliged to comment upon the current problems in the meat industry, having found the news shocking but not surprising in the least. Much has been said and blame laid in all directions,my views on supermarket meat is well known to regular readers,so I will simply say this,

The consumer has been lead by the large supermarket chains, to expect to be able to buy cheap meat. Governments too have encouraged this attitude to food.

In the past livestock has suffered horribly as proper farming practice has gone buy the board in order to increase yield and speed up production.

Farmers and growers have suffered ,being forces to cut prices to the bone until in some cases the animals they sell have cost more to feed than the farmers is paid for supplying them.

Cheap meat does not really exist, cheap mince consists of..as well as horse I mean...veins and arteries,connective tissue,cartilage and fat minced finely and sold as meat, which it patently is not.

It is not nutritious and the money spent on these(Value?) products is wasted. We are all being cheated, the poorest of us most of all. Most of these so called value products are exactly the reverse,but how are people to know this when home economics and domestic science are no longer taught in schools,they have been replaced by something called Life Skills. What the hell are those? Isn’t b having the ability to fed your family a nutritious diet on a budget a life skill,one that both boys and girls should be taught.

These days the only budget people know about is the Chancellor of the exchequers occasional fiddle with the countries economy,often to no good purpose.

If consumers refused to purchase the mass produced, factory farmed meat the super markets and their dodgy supply chains would be in total disarray within days.

No one, particularly the less well of, for whom every penny counts deserve to be cheated by the giant chain groceries. We pay the piper and now it's time we called the tune, buy less meat but buy better quality,leave the factory farmed pork and chickens which have spent their entire lives having their feet and legs burnt buy standing in their own filth....very wholesome!

I know this sounds hard but its really not that difficult,we need to do this for all our sakes

not least the animals in question.

Meat is not the only source of protein and freshly cooked food will always be more nutritious that the over salted,over sugared,over packaged horse meat peddled by the supermarkets.

Find a small butcher and give him your support,he will give you honest advice about how to cook the cheaper cuts of meat,after all , he has a reputation to consider in his community. Please give it a try.