So, while the supermarkets and food industry hunt along the  food chain for where the horse came in, and splutter out garbage like “its a labelling issue”,  you may wonder why bother?  Why bother to buy premade ‘Beef’ Lasagna or Cottage Pie, or cheap burgers.   Why bother when you have local butchers in town where they can tell you where the meat came from, who will tell you the best cut of meat for your meal and who will cut it off the carcass in front of you – should you wish.

 For many people, it is a convenient and affordable way to buy meat products.  The semantics of whether its DSM (Desinewed Meat) or the now banned MRM (Mechanically Recovered Meat) will pass them by.    They don’t have the time, the knowledge or the inclination to make a Lasagne from scratch, or use leftovers from a roast for Cottage Pie.  And for those reasons, they don’t investigate how cost effective a decent butcher can be for you.  Yes, the meat is more expensive, but a good butcher knows the provenance and breed of his meat, where it comes from,  which abattoir was used.  A good butcher will only put into his burgers, or sausages, what he is prepared for his family to eat.

I have had countless, extremely lively, conversations with people who don’t buy any food outside a supermarket.  Their main reason is TIME.  They don’t have TIME to buy locally, they don’t have TIME to prepare a meal for their family, they don’t have TIME to learn how to put a decent meal together. 

A free range chicken costing about £8.00 will easily provide four servings, as will a leg of lamb for about the same price.  Both take about 5 minutes to prepare for the oven and then a couple of hours to cook.  Roast Potatoes barely take five minutes to clean and peel before they can be put into the oven as well.  In the meantime, while the meal cooks, you can do anything you like, go for a walk, watch a soap, read a book, have a bath, whatever.

A chicken carcass or lamb bone can be transformed into beautiful stock – cooked gently in a pot of water with a carrot, a celery stick, bay leaf, an onion, for a couple of hours.

What’s so TIME consuming about that?

If you do get leftovers from the roast, the LoveFood Hate Waste website and countless other sites, such as the BBC have bags of recipe ideas.

If you buy from your local butchers, grocers and markets, you have provenance, you have fewer food miles, a much shorter food chain, you are helping your local economy and feeding your family more healthily, and more cost and time effectively. 

I’ll stop nagging now..................