The perennial conundrum of what are we giving the kids for tea has taken an interesting new twist lately.
From about 4.30pm onwards any adult in the vicinity of our kitchen is likely to be interrogated by any one of our children about what tea is going to be that night.
They start circling like predators, inspecting what is laid out on the kitchen worktop or if that is not inspiring them, sauntering over to the fridge.
The ones who are tall enough to open the door do so and stare into the cool glow with a forlorn expression and invariably release a heavy sigh.
Our food never matches their dreams, bless their little hearts, but they still ask all the same.
“What’s for tea tonight?”
Groans of disappointment
And now I can say with some degree of certainty that I don’t know. I usually say I don’t know just to avoid the groans of disappointment from my daughter who is four and only eats if the food doesn’t bore her.
Now I can say I don’t know because the label might say it’s beef but labels, we have found out, can be so wrong...
The horsemeat lasagne scandal seems like a painfully inevitable one to me.
A picture has emerged of a long and complicated supply chain involving different companies processing bits of animal until it is finally assembled into something for eating.
The market may well drive costs down but there is an inevitable problem here.
If there are 20 companies in a supply chain and times are tight that is 20 companies that will be trying to do things a little bit cheaper.
No-one needs to be a supervillain to have things go drastically wrong.
You don’t need someone to decide “we’re going to pass these horse lasagnes off as beef” you just need everyone in the chain to be taking little shortcuts and things start slipping through the net.
It is impossible to test every burger before it lands on a plate so to some degree the system is always going to be relying on trust.
CRIMINALLY DETERMINED
If someone is really criminally determined you are going to eat horses you will probably end up eating horses.
But the truth is this is not about what we eat. This is about what we buy. If the supermarket is selling me horsemeat I want it to know it is selling me horsemeat.
My One True Love and I were out without the kids the other night and we decided to treat ourselves to the crafty luxury of a drive-thru burger.
I don’t know if they were short-staffed but it took 20 minutes for someone to bring our order out in a bag.
Frankly, by that stage, I wouldn’t have cared if it was a badger burger as long as it was cheap, tasty and quick. And labelled correctly of course.
It has been mooted by Northampton Borough Council officers that the reasons there were less shoppers in the town centre in the last quarter of last year were twofold.
It was partly the state of the economy and partly the rain.
The report that came up with this gem has been roundly criticised but I rather like the idea that whoever compiled it thought that the worst economic crisis in living memory was not enough to explain a three per cent drop in visitor numbers.
Three-and-a-half million people were counted in Northampton town centre between October and December last year. That’s about 100,000 missing persons from the previous year.
Someone in a council office must have thought: “Surely the worst economic crisis in living memory can’t have affected that many people? We need a more plausible explanation as well. Rain.”
What I want to know is what else what on the list of other plausible explanations?
The winter vomiting bug would have been worth a punt. Television is getting too good would surely have raised a smile or two.
I tend to go into town for entertainment shopping: food treats, gifts for others, gifts for myself. None of our major regular weekly shopping needs to happen in the town centre so it doesn’t. It happens wherever the parking is free, rain or shine.
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