Spot the war profiteering disguised as charidee

Don't forget the profit opportunities

A few weeks ago, flicking through my Twitter feed, I came across a retweeted contribution from one Douglas Carswell, the newly-elected – and first – UKIP MP.

In just 147 characters, he managed to mention both “sofa government” and “citizen consumers”.

The former is all about government policy being made by senior ministers and a handful of advisors.

The latter refers to an idea that citizens, via their consumption, can ensure that companies make ethical decisions.

It has been done. In the 1980s, declining sales of aerosols producing CFCs forced manufacturers to rethink the products and come up with less environmentally damaging solutions.

But apart from such high-profile campaigns, how much can it work?

For instance, will enough people to make a difference boycott companies that pay such low wages that the taxpayer has to top them up in order for workers to be able to afford to live?

Underlying it all is the ideology of deregulation: if the consumer makes the choices, no government intervention would be needed. And, of course, The Market, given free rein, will provide the ‘perfect’ results (as though the market were somehow not entirely dependent on human intervention, including political intervention and decisions – but that’s a different subject).

All of which sounds lovely, but is as divorced from reality as telling people that, if regulations are removed and those at the top were just allowed to do whatever they want in order to make money, the increased wealth would ‘trickle down’ to everyone else.

It also supposes that the majority of people are, when being consumers, able to make ethical choices that often mean spending at least a little more cash – or that most people have the time or inclination to investigate the ethics behind every purchase that they make, which itself often means digging quite deep behind the façade of corporate bullshit.

Blingtastic way to remember the war dead

In terms of affording the ethical, the fallacy of trickle-down is a major factor in why incomes for the majority have fallen, putting increasing numbers of people in a position where they can less and less afford to look for those ethical options.

Research in the US suggests that consumers (or at least some) want the companies that they buy from to be involved with ‘causes’.

I’ve dealtwith ‘cause marketing’ on this blog previously, but this is just another take on the same thing, spun a little differently and taking it to the level of political ideology.

Over the weekend, there appeared on my TV an advert from Sainsbury’s, linking that store with the Royal British Legion’s poppy appeal.

The company offered, among other things, to recycle your poppy if you return it to the store after use. The advert describes a commitment to the past – and the future – with images of an elderly man (a veteran, presumably) and a young boy (a future veteran?), while also noting that stores sell a range of poppy-related objects (such as an umbrella), with proceeds going to the Legion.

So, is Sainsbury’s doing all this out a genuine sense of charity/patriotism?

Well, it might be. It is entirely possible that the company’s head honchos feel a deep commitment to remembrance and to the wellbeing of veterans.

But on the other hand, that’s not why it’s being advertised in such a way. It’s being advertised to show the company in such a light that it will encourage customers to shop there.

That is not ethical: it is nothing other, at core, than trying to profit from war.

Oh, Sainsbury’s might not make a penny from any poppy-related purchase or act of education or recycling – some of these might even cost the company money. But all that is an investment.

The chances of someone responding to that advert just to pop this year’s used poppy in a recycling tub (instead of in the recycling bag or box they get from the local waste collection service), and not then doing some shopping there seems a tad unlikely.

Will people really decide to make an extra shopping trip just to go to Sainsbury’s – when they do not do so usually – to buy a poppy brolly – when you can choosefrom seven different poppy umbrellas at the Royal British Legion’s own online shop – and then walk out and not pick up a few odds and ends for that midweek supper?

This is about persuading the ‘citizen consumer’ to shop at Sainsbury’s because it shows obvious, outward support for a cause that that shopper cares about. The adverts are deliberately placed to coincide with the annual remembrance ceremonies and Armistice Day.

They won’t be appearing next April, with a message that Sainsbury’s is still caring about remembrance and veterans, even when no poppies are on sale and no commemorations are scheduled.

Poppy pizzas from Tesco

If Sainsbury’s cared about remembrance and veterans, and not profits, it wouldn’t spend hundreds of thousands of pounds creating advertising campaigns on the issue. It could donate that cash to the Legion instead, without making a hoo-ha about it that simply screams: ‘just look how good we are by doing charidee stuff’.

This is cause marketing, aimed at the citizen consumer, and with the prime intent of increasing footfall and, with that, profits.

Of course, Sainsbury’s is far from being alone in such behavior. Indeed, Bill King spotted Tesco selling ‘poppy pizzas’.

A Tesco pizza is probably tasteless anyway, but this takes it to a whole new level.

And there will be be countless more companies playing the same sort of games.

So perhaps the ‘real’ citizen consumer should, then, deliberately refuse to spend money at companies that so blatantly exploit the war dead to make a buck.

They might also consider that the Royal British Legion needs funds to help veterans, because governments that send people to war rarely seem much interested in those veterans once they return, and thus the public is left to fill the pick up the pieces via charitable donation.

But then again, all this would involve real and meaningful ethical or moral choices: and that is not what the concepts of ‘citizen consumer’ and ‘cause marketing’ are remotely about.

Food as fuel – and a Yorkshire pudding challenge

Now that's what a proper Yorkie pudding looks like

The subject of food seems to bring out some very strange attitudes in people – and it’s no different when the context is television and food.

As the finals week began on Monday, the Telegraph managed to publish three articles on the subject of Masterchef The Professionals, all with the chance for readers to comment.

Some of the comments were quite absurd, but also rather revealing.

“There should be less of this daft adulation of chefs, women or men. Period,” stated one reader emphatically.

“It makes me laugh. All they do is cook food and you would somehow think they were performing open heart surgery such is the importance they place on themselves,” said another.

“What amazes me is that people actually watch these programmes ........ it’s only food, and it’s always been perfectly obvious, the more you do to it the less appetising it becomes, and the more expensive!”

“Food as God, another form of self-worship!”

As a little experiment, just try to imagine any of these comments being about, say, art and artists or composers and music. You can’t really, can you?

Equally, can you imagine those comments being made in France?

Masterchef The Professionals remains one of the least dumbed-down programmes on TV; one that celebrates and showcases serious skills, and encourages those on it, without being shouty – and yet some people actually object to that because it’s related to food.

The “adulation” comment received 11 likes: “all they do is cook food” received six.

“… the more you do to it the less appetising it becomes, and the more expensive!” suggests that somebody doesn’t understand what can go on in some high-end restaurants and probably hasn’t actually eaten in one either – certainly none of the ones I’ve had the fortune to dine in.

But “it’s only food” and “all they do is cook food” suggest people who really don’t get the pleasure of good food – or perhaps they merely don’t approve of it. It’s the food-as-fuel argument all over again.

In recent years, new-build flats in the UK have sometimes been designed and built with no kitchen, but just the space for a microwave. The assumption is that people don’t want to cook properly, but only consume ‘ping’ food or eat out.

Also in the UK, sales of dining tables have declined.

As Joanna Blythman noted in Bad Food Britain, when one developer built some holiday homes, they had a problem once visitors from abroad started staying – those visitors wanted and expected rather more than a microwave with which to cook, so the developer had to start installing proper kitchens.

In terms of Europe at least, this attitude to food seems to be a particularly British thing, although it’s changing elsewhere too, with France, for instance, seeing an increase in some people working and eating lunches at desks and increasingly eating junk food.

The root of all this is the attitude toward food that views it simply as fuel, to which can be added a rather puritan distrust of taking pleasure in what you eat, as though this is something inherently bad – or even immoral.

It reminds me of my own mother intoning: “We don’t live to eat; we eat to live” as a warning against too much pleasure in what was on your plate. And equally, her attitude toward teaching me and my sister any cooking skills or any recipes, which boiled down to: ‘you’ll learn when you have to do it’.

It’s a quite extraordinary attitude that pretends there is little or no skill involved in the kitchen, and that there is no reason to spend time learning about it.

It’s an incredibly basic life skill, yet so many leave it to chance.

My mother also pulled me out of any cooking classes at school fairly rapidly, having decided that it was a waste of money.

Perhaps that’s why so many cookery books are sold in the UK each year – because nobody has a clue what they’re doing in the kitchen and they end up trying to use such tomes to fill that gap?

I was in exactly that category myself when I started living on my own. But however well you can read a recipe, if you don’t have those basic skills, you’ll come unstuck.

It’s all very well, for instance, to say: ‘brown the meat’, but how much is right? How hot do you need the fat first? What fat works best? And so on.

My mother’s approach was hardly unique. Survey after survey has shown that cooking skills are low in the UK – few people, for instance, can cook more than three meals without having a recipe in front of them.

A few years ago, Tesco – with no apparent understanding of its own role in this – published a survey that showed that only elderly people really know what to do with different cuts of meat and how to make traditional dishes such as Lancashire hot pot.

People in middle age know less and such knowledge declined even more in still younger people.

It’s as though our parents decided to stop cooking properly the moment that they could grab ready meals from the rapidly expanding supermarkets and with the advent of the microwave.

And this lack of knowledge seems to be repeated in other countries – New Zealand has similar survey results, for example. And these are also countries, like the UK, that have rising obesity.

But there’s not just the health implication – there’s a cultural one too. Do we really care so little about our culinary heritage that we don’t mind if that hot pot dies out altogether, as Tesco suggested could happen when it published that survey?

There are people who claim that British food has nothing to recommend it, but that’s nonsense.

There are plenty of classic British dishes that, cooked well, are superb. That hot pot is just one – it merits an individual entry in Larousse Gastronomique – but what about Yorkshire pudding as another example?

It’s difficult to imagine anything much easier: all you need is to mix together some plain flour, milk, water, an egg, then heat some fat in your oven, pour the batter into a dish and Bob’s your uncle, yet people spend far more than that little lot costs on frozen ones or even on a mix, the latter of which includes stacks of additives.

Here’s the ingredient list for Auntie Bessie’s Yorkie mix – 79p at Ocado for 128g, which makes 12:

“Wheatflour, Dried Egg, Skimmed Milk Powder, Raising Agents (Sodium Bicarbonate, Sodium Aluminium Phosphate), Salt, Sugar, Potato Starch, Emulsifiers (Mono- and Di-Glycerides of Fatty Acids, Lacto Glycerides, Propylene Glycol Esters of Fatty Acids), Dried Glucose Syrup, Maltodextrin, Stabiliser (Diphosphates)”

The marketing spiel says: “I’ve used only the best ingredients to create my perfect Yorkshire pudding mix. Now it’s over to you! Just add water and whisk to create a smooth batter and bake in the oven for irresistible Yorkshire puddings just the way you like them!”

Now there’s a challenge, Auntie.

Let’s try Delia’s recipe and using some seriously high-quality ingredients.

This is what we need and the prices are via Ocado (so essentially what I would have in and use):

1.5kg plain organic flour – £1.89;

Organic full-fat milk – £1.85 for 2 litres;

Organic, free range eggs £2.18 per 6;

Dripping – 72p for 500g.

For Delia’s measures, therefore:

75g plain flour – just under 10p;

1 egg – 36p;

75ml milk – so just over 7p;

Two tablespoons beef dripping – at 0.13g per spoon, that’s 0.26g of fat, coming in at 19.2p;

Water and seasoning – let’s assume you’ve got these in. You still need the former for the packet mix, but what would you realistically add for the best-quality salt and pepper? It’d still only be a penny at the most.

So that’s a total of 72.2p. In other words, using the really best, readily-available ingredients, it’s still cheaper than a box of pre-mixed powder.

There’s a lot more weight for your money too – 150g as opposed 128g, and that’s without adding the egg and water, which suggests that the 12 that the packet says it will make will be substantial enough for the feast in a doll’s house.

So even with top-quality ingredients, it’s cheaper to make your own Yorkshire pudding mix than buy it, and you also avoid additives.

You’ve still got to whisk up the packet mix, and measure the water out, so it’s hardly as though the packet mix it’s a whopping big time saver – and don’t tell me that measuring the flour and milk is staggeringly onerous, because it’s not.

People have been conned – utterly conned. And if you’re thinking that my example was only a difference of a few pennies, remember that for the sake of this post, it was all top-end ingredients, and remember that those pennies can mean a great deal in a climate where food costs are rising and wage are not.

But how much of this is down to a lack of basic cooking skills and a lack of confidence in the kitchen?

Nobody’s going to watch Masterchef The Professionals to learn cookery from scratch. But the idea that a serious celebration of culinary skills is over the top, and that cooking is “only food” are an indicator of the parlous state of affairs that exists in many British kitchens – and that’s not good for health or pockets.

And if we could only stop thinking of food as fuel, and learn to enjoy it – and why not, since we have to eat? – then how much would that improve the nation's health and wellbeing too?

* If you’re in the Wigan area and would like to learn more about cooking, and about food on a budget, Shirley Southworth at Food Positive can help.

In Liverpool, Can Cook and Happy Go Cooking can help.

In Cardiff, Communities First is involved in schemes to help people learn to cook – Bill King, who I interviewed in the summer, is involved in that scheme.

Bread of heaven

For many people, the realisation that they’re likely to be made redundant in the not-too-distant future is one of the most unwelcome pieces of news that they can receive.

But for some, it can offer the opportunity for a major change of direction.

Bill King had spent years working in local government in the Cwmbran area of Wales. More than that – he was also a trade union convenor.

But when he realised that his own job was to be rationalised away, he saw a possibility and seized the opportunity with both hands.

“I’ve always cooked,” he explains in his soft burr, which is more West Country than Wales. With a father in the RAF, he was leaving the UK for Suez at three weeks old and only came back when he was 10.

“For my sins, I got a charity scholarship to a public school [he was in the same class as RSC and The Thick of It actor Roger Allam] and you did learn to cook.

“When you’ve eaten at 6 o’clock in the evening, you’re going to be hungry at 8 o’clock, 10 o’clock whatever. One of the first things I did, when I got into it, was set up what I suppose was one of the first ever supper clubs.

“It was a kind of covert dining club. We found a room that wasn’t being used, and I'd cook in one of the very small kitchens upstairs, and then 10 or 20 people would just get together and have food.

"So I always have cooked and was largely self-taught. Always done all the cooking at home."

His partner Janet never learned to cook, he explains, not least because her mother “god love her – couldn’t cook to save her life. She was set in her ways. For example, 1 April was salad season until the 30 October.

“And it went on a strict rotation: cheese, ham, cheese ham, with the immortal question: ‘ow d’ya want yer salad? On a plate or in a saaandwich?’

“And Sunday lunch would go pork, lamb, beef, chicken; pork, lamb, beef, chicken – irrespective of the weather. Friday lunchtime would be fish in plastic bags. Saturday lunch was always pie and chips from the chippy.

“She came and ate with us once and I’d cooked my usual incredibly rare bit of beef, and she said: ‘just how I love my beef!’ and I thought: ‘why do you cook yours like boot leather then?”

“So I’ve always cooked. I’m not artistic, but I put stuff into cooking that I probably couldn’t put into anything else.

“Years back – probably 20 years ago – I was given a voucher for a one-day course at Ballymaloe, and I went and had a great time, and thought: ‘I’ve got to go there; I’ve got to do the three-month course.”

That’s not cheap and, he says, every time he had just got the money together, “some major disaster would come up” and he was back to square one, saving for it.

But eventually, he had enough in the bank. Then, as the end of a lengthy job evaluation neared, which his union duties had seen him heavily involved in, it became “clear that I’d never be going back to my old job after it”.

His employer agreed that, under those circumstances and since it was really rather sensible to be planning for an alternative future, he could use a combination of paid leave and unpaid leave to make up the three months of the course.

“It was the best three months of my life,” he says.

“Extremely intense. People talk about going into the ‘Ballymaloe bubble’ and you do kind of live in one. It’s in the middle of a 100-acre organic farm with 10 acres of organic market garden, and effectively you do a three-year catering college course in 12 weeks.

“The way you do it – the average college course is nine to 3.30, breaks and whatever: at Ballymaloe, you’re in the kitchen from eight to 1.30. You get a short break, then at quarter to two, you’re back into demonstrations until, say, quarter past, half past five, with a tasting at the end.

“Then you get another quick tea break and there’s a lecture of some variety – could be on wine, cheese – so you’re generally finishing seven or eight o’clock at night. You go back, write out your work for the next day, file the recipes for what you’ve been cooking that day – and go to bed.

“And at 7 o'clock in the morning, you have ‘assorted duties’, which may be getting fresh veg out of the field, selecting the herbs from the herb garden ... or milking the cows.”

If those “assorted duties” mean milking the Jerseys, which Bill describes as “the prime job”, students then separate the milk to make butter and cheese, nipping back all morning to stir the curds for the latter.

It’s not difficult to see how three months of 18 to 19-hour days can mount into the equivalent of a three-year course.

And then there are the weekends: all on a ‘voluntary basis’ (Bill’s quotation marks). Students are sent out for a different kind of training – to Cork on a Friday to do a night shift with an artisan baker or to a hotel or restaurant to wait on tables for the evening, for instance.

The Ballymaloe philosophy, he explains, is an holistic one: students need to gain a really wide understanding of food – “where it comes from, how to use it, how to process it, how to serve it”; there are even some basic lessons in business.

The final exam requires students to complete such varied tasks as identifying 20 kinds of salad and drawing a diagram of a table setting, while “the first recipe you get at Ballymaloe is actually for compost”.

Because, he notes, as Ballymaloe founder and slow food doyen “Darina [Allen] says, ‘good food starts with good earth’.”

Bill is a delightful raconteur, and he happily describes things in great detail, seasoned with anecdote and his mimicry.

But after Ballymaloe, what then?

“I’ve always enjoyed making bread, and at Ballymaloe you make bread every day”. But there’s another rather special advantage.

“It’s the easiest way to get past environmental health,” he reveals.

“There’s very little risk in bread. Done properly, it’s flour, it’s water, it’s salt, it’s yeast. It bakes at 230 degrees. That will kill any bacteria.”

Even though he’s currently only got a double oven – there's another oven on order – he’s still able to bake from within his home kitchen.

There are still schedules for cleaning his kitchen and equipment, including deep cleans, but he doesn't have to wash his baking tins (“unless something sticks to them”). Regular use seasons them, and environmental health is happy with that, as long as he stores them upside down so that nothing can get inside.

But baking is “also something you can teach people – and teaching is far more profitable than making bread,” he adds with a wry version of his characteristic laugh.

“The overheads are extremely limited and it only takes four hours!”

Which is probably a good thing. He was given a helpful spreadsheet by the Welsh government when he started the business, and “the last time I looked at it, my hourly rate was 98p!”

On the other hand, he observes that his new career has made a ‘phenomenal’ difference to his quality of life.

“I loved my years in the trade union movement,” he adds, proudly pointing to his UNISON lifetime membership badge, “but I get the same adrenalin rush when I’ve done a really big bake” as after a week at annual conference.

Indeed, he had nipped up to Liverpool for the day to meet old friends and catch up on the gossip at this year's conference.

And he says that it’s an incredible buzz to have people going back, time again, to see him on a market “and saying things like: ‘thank god we’re here early ... you were out of such and such last week and it’s the best I’ve ever had’. And you think: ‘this is nice. This is what I want to do’.

Baking has also opened doors that he never expected, and he’s made many new friends.

He mentions Arun Kapil of Green Saffron Spices – “you will hear a hell of lot more of him” – and enthuses about how the former musician blends his spices, treating his work like music, looking to combine “high notes, low notes, medium notes”.

“I’ll tell you how good he is – he makes bespoke spice mixes for Mark Hix, Richard Corrigan and Gordon Ramsey, and he’s a consultant to some bloke called Blumenthal!”

It’s a friendship that means that, when Arun gives “tutored master classes and tastings” at this summer’s Abergavenny Food Festival, Bill will be baking the breads that he will use.

In September, he’s off to Cork for the Celtic Cook Off. It’s a sort of Ready Steady Cook-style competition, using just local ingredients, and featuring chefs from all across the Celtic world, including Cornwall and Brittany.

They’ll start the event with a big lunch – and Bill is the baker of choice for both the lunch and for the cook off.

Then in October, he’ll be doing a “hands-on session at the Newport Food Festival”.

It is, he says, a bit more “about who you know than how good you are”, but then again, you don't get invited back into that company if you're not good.

Just before Christmas last year, he reveals that Rachel Allen (Darina’s daughter-in-law) was over here and they’d met up, with her introducing him to some influential people as “the best baker we had at Ballymaloe!”

“I’m sure I wasn’t,” says Bill, “but that got me an in with chef and TV presenter Matt Tebbutt!”

He talks about the rising food scene in his part of Wales – not just top chefs, but good producers too.

And it’s clear that his own food philosophy extends way beyond bread.

There are farmers that he knows, and he describes not only how they look after their animals, but also how they slaughter them, in the least stressful manner possible. It’s light years away from the horror stories of industrialised, centralised abattoirs.

Which is a good thing, since (accidentally) he actually managed to take Janet on a visit to an abattoir on a recent wedding anniversary.

In the meantime, of course, the final product of such an approach, in your pan or under your grill, and most certainly on your plate, is so much better for having had such care taken.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he says, after observing that he’s always understood the value of fresh, quality ingredients, but “in many ways, there’s nothing as satisfying as a fishfinger sandwich, with ketchup, on some really thick, sliced industrial white.”

And he then gives another example of how to use a cheap, Chorleywood loaf.

“That bread is so flimsy … take the crusts off, roll it out – you can get it paper thin – dip in melted butter, either side; stick it in a bun tin, bake it off in the oven for 10 minutes, and you have the most amazing, crisp stuff.

“And I’ve had people say: ‘that’s the most amazing pastry we’ve tasted’, and you tell ’em: ‘actually, it’s just really cheap bread!’

He’s been contemplating that busy festival ‘season’ that is approaching, and remembering the festivals that he used to go to. The Jerry Garcia t-shirt gives a hint.

“It’s really worrying,” he muses, “to think that most of the people I went to see are dead.” And then he bursts out into Falstaffian laughter once more.

He remembers seeing “The Doors and Hendrix at the Isle of Wight.

“I first saw the Grateful Dead in ’72 … I love Jerry,” he adds, before noting that the food world has also led him to “a bigger Dead head than myself” in James Swift, who runs Trealy Farm, which makes British charcuterie.

The discovery of their mutual love of Grateful Dead came at last year’s Newport Food Festival, where Bill was the “official blogger or something to that effect”.

A completely accidental comment saw James revealing that he’d got recordings of 1,500 live shows.

Such is the way to start a friendship.

And with thoughts of such music, another strand of memory begins to unfurl.

“In those days, I was on a fairly macrobiotic diet – or mung beans 500 ways. The only place you could get them in Aberystwyth was a place called The Happy Stores, which was run by one of these weird and wonderful cults and they were all trying to recruit you if you went in to buy anything.

“‘A pound of balti peas, please’. ‘Would you like to come out to the ashram for a weekend?’ ‘No, just my peas please’.”

In a complete swing around from his admission of a brief period of vegetarianism, Bill has a book that he’s keen to recommend – An Irish Butcher Shop by Pat Whelan.

Pat is a seventh-generation farmer and fifth-generation butcher who now runs James Whelan Butchers in Ireland, and is committed to sustainability, nose-to-tail eating and quality, and Bill describes the book as a “a brilliant treatise on cooking”.

Pat’s philosophy is that ‘knowledge without sharing is merely information’, says Bill, so Pat shares it – and so does Bill himself.

The conversation wanders off into further discussion of the link between compassionate farming and the quality of produce, plus the disconnect in the UK between food and how it is produced, which allows a good laugh about a recent Apprentice competitor who thought that a field of horses was a field of dogs.

Bill would happily talk the hind legs off the proverbial donkey when it comes to matters culinary, but one thing’s clear: for this artisanal baker, finding himself forced into a career change in his mid-50s really has proved to be the bread of heaven.

Bill King Artisan Baker

Ballymaloe Cookery School

Green Saffron Spices

Trealy Farm Charcuterie

The Meat Course at Trealy Farm

James Whelan Butchers

Abergavenny Food Festival

Celtic Cook Off

Newport Food Festival