I can't believe it's not, was, is, might be, might have been, maybe never again, butter

Interesting how we all act on 'scientific discoveries', or on what 'they' tell us - they being government groups set up to inform us about what we should be eating and doing in order to maintain our health.
I recall the NO FAT scare in the mid eighties? well, for the last few decades in fact. I had friends who went on scary diets where they would only drink skimmed milk, eat no-fat yogurt and special no-fat cereal bars, and cook with one squirt of an oil spray - not even a squirt, a microscopic misting of oil.



I was looking for an 80s diet food image but couldn't resist the sauna exercise suit . . .


We kept on with the butter - in fairly modest quantities. It tastes nice, where as Utterly Butterly, does not. We kept sloshing the oil into bolognese, stir-fries, curries and so on, and after having blood tests for a medical 'M.O.T' discovered that our cholesterol levels, etc, were fine.
It's like eggs in the 1970s. After Edwina Currie's (what sort of a name is that . . .) declaration that salmonella was present in most of the UK's eggs, sales crashed and four million hens were destroyed. It seems she had meant to say 'much' rather than most; what a difference a tiny word can make. However I think 'much' would have still had a fairly drastic outcome.
And how many veg and fruit a day is it now? Five? ten, eight and half, does that count peas? How many peas is a portion? Who decides all this and how much fruit and veg do they eat?
We're having a butter shortage in France at the moment which has been compared to shortages during the war. Shelves are devoid of the rectangular foil packets but plenty of Marge-U-Like, or whatever the French equivalents are. Apparently this is due to lower milk yields, a bad grazing year (dry weather) and massive exports of butter, cream and pastries to the newly-French patisserie-loving Chinese, who will no doubt in time be having a health crisis and told to eat, 'I can't believe it's not butter' instead.

                                                  

                                                                         mm, yum

Rationing would probably be good, for our own sakes as well as the long-suffering dairy cows. Less butter, from better cared for animals. Anyway, we should all eat less of everything in our overloaded part of the world: less fat, certainly less sugar, less alcohol, less meat; more cabbage and lentils, and more education about how to cook, shop, avoid food manufacturers hype, and take anything 'they' say with a massive shovel full of salt.



                                                    

Happy black Friday

I shall venture out to the market and buy some cabbage.

Hey . . . d'you wanna cabbage?

I was just walking the dogs back from the school amble a couple of days ago and this guy popped out from behind a tall gate and said the above (in French). I wondered if 'chou' was also used as a local word for indulging in something deviant as he was looking a bit shifty. Then I realised he was one of our neigbours from over the train tracks. I've only spoken to him a couple of times, not because either of us are unfriendly, but we just don't cross paths very often.

I followed him into the garden and he pointed to a row of magnificent cabbages growing in dark rich loamy soil.
I was immediately wildly envious as our garden's crappy vine soil won't grow such things. Put in a baby cabbage plant and it sits there, growing in a sort of arrested state, perhaps a nano-millimetre every month, not actually dying off, just not really getting any bigger. Eventually, plucked from the crusty soil about a year later having ingested a bath-worths of water, off to the kitchen.
Nice folk invited round for dinner say things like: "Mmm, so fresh, such a condensed cabbage taste, you can always tell when something's organic by the number of slug holes in it." - In this case more hole than vegetable.
Anyway, Monsieur vanished to a shed, came back with a large knife and proceeded to remove one of the cabbages (pictured here with a key to show its monster proportions). He put it in a bin liner and presented it to me: "Voila, madame."
       "Merci bien, Monsieur!"
       "It is my pleasure, madame . . . we never eat cabbage."
What?You grow these things, well, just toss a few seeds about - they grow into Women's institute vegetable show specimens, without a single word of encouragement from you . . . and you don't eat them! Merde alors! "Vraiment . . . really? How strange, monsieur," Grrrr.
He then told me many interesting stories of the various roads in that part of town: who's donkey lived where in 1933; what Madame Dupont sold in her shop on the corner, and how there used to be a fabulously beautiful stone arch and ramparts at the end of the road before the hideous fire station was constructed in the 1980s. It was all really fascinating. I would like to go back and write this valuable history down. He had been born in the house behind us; his parents and grandparents had lived there and had no doubt always grown magnificent cabbages, which in another era they certainly would have eaten.
I walked back clutching the bag and shouting at the dogs as they wandered off in search of unspeakable things to consume.
How wonderful, I thought, (as we passed our own sorry looking, weed-strewn veg patch), it would be to look back in time at that garden when his grandparents were using it as their main food source, chickens, pigs, fruit . . . and cabbages.