Re: On service to the gods

Halla" wrote in response to Jymn's reply to her previous post:

[Land]

Found that DVD now. A minor victory. <g>

I knows that one, well done

<snip>
The problem then is conversing with humans :~)

A 'ping!' moment there, as the lightbulb went on or the pin
dropped, or whatever else happened. That's usually the
problem, isn't it?

True, regardless of the form being occupied, including being human.


I remember reading accounts of Tibetan Lamas who'd have
themselves walled up
in a cave in their search for enlightenment - I always
thought it a shame that they'd ever pass on whatever they'd
leaned. (Especially if it was the futility of doing this).


So they weren't brought back out, then? <:-/

From memory, someone would take food to them and slide it into a hole in the
wall. When the food was left untouched they'd block the hole up.
Conversation wasn't allowed.

I grew up knowing I'd be drinking Daisy's milk and eating
her calf. that piglets were fun and would growup to be
tasty. I don't think it did me any
harm, though others will probably disagree.

As an aside, IIb won the school barbecue's 'name the calf'
competition, she called it 'Shefo'. <:-) I was not tempted to
point out what usually happens to cute little calves when
they get bigger, because it was raining and there was no
actual barbecue nearby. <eg>

I like the name, where did she get it from?
There's plenty of time for that one, /methinks she won't grow up ignorant of
the facts.

<snip>
I have real problems undestanding some people. I don't know
how the divide between reality and their world came about,
and how its sustained.

But what do you mean, their worldview *is* reality. ;->
(Actually I'm only half-joking there.)

tbf their consensual reality and the reality I live in are probably only
distantly related to Reality. Unfortunately their reality has the advantage
of weight of numbers, - back to the energy discussion.

I can
understand that lots of people have no direct contact with
farm animals and
(to an extent) understand that many people regard pets as
substitute children, but to disassociate food from its
source must take huge amounts of
filtering of reality.

Not really. It's far less likely that kids will even know
someone who works in agriculture at all, they may not live
within easy reach of worked fields and if they do it depends
where they are whether they'll see actual food animals
gambbolling about, or acres and acres of some crop or other.

But, but, but there is TV, ah, yes I see your point.

Although veg growing is undergoing a bit of a renaissance, I
haven't seen many folk keeping a pig in their back garden
(unless they're Gordon Ramsey, and his property sort of
strains the definition of 'garden' really. ;-).

My father and his father (another butcher) both did slaughtering of pigs
kept in fairly small backyards. Tis a practise that has largely died out.
Not having seen Ramsey's garden, but going off what I've read, there are
smaller market gardens, if not small holdings.

There are fewer speciality shops (by that I mean butchers and
grocers rather than the pricier delis and so on), so no big
vans arriving on local high streets with bits of cow hanging
in them for the butcher.

And most supermarket meat arrives in packets these days. Even the few
butchers shops that are left seem to do all their prep in a back shop rather
than have bits of identifiable carcass where the customer can see them. :-(
Adverts like the Heinz chilli sauce one don't help. Flavoured tomato ketchup
growing on a bush.

Generally the supermarkets offer a smaller range of both type
and cuts of meat IME, if they do have things like duck it's
pretty much packaged to look like a chicken, any rabbit they
may sell is in frozen cubes, and if they ever get venison
it's prohibitively expensive FSR. Since the supermarkets want
to get us all eating out of their hands (and theirs only),
there must be millions of people who have no need to know
what bit of what animal their little packaged tray of meat
came from - how many people were bothered about where in the
world it came from before recent campaigns about food miles
began, after all?

Only those who wanted New Zealand lamb or Jersey Royals or Kenyan Blue
Mountain I suspect.

So if all these consumers are filtering reality, they're not
doing it all on their own. Slices of meat in little trays,
divorced from any reference to the animal that provided them,
or tomatoes in a punnet flown in from hundreds or thousands
of miles away with no reference to the resources needed to
grow them and get them here is food shopping reality for a
lot of people. Perhaps a majority, at the moment.

Very probably a majority. I've no idea if that is even reversible tbh. And
the curent situation makes it very easy to introduce artificial foods
without question. Suuny D and Quorn spring to mind.
Late 80s or thereabouts I remember experiments with surami (the stuff that
"crabsticks is made of" including strawberry snacks.

I have a far harder time figuring out how people can mistake
a dog (large hairy thing with sharp teeth and a bark at one
end, walks on four paws and has no opposable thumbs) as some
sort of misshapen human. <;-)

I have problems working out how people can regard toy yorkshire terriers as
dogs </tic> and treat all forms of pets as perpetual babies/children.

<snip>
but avoid if there is any real choice. One amusement has
been the price rise
of most of the bits that were considered last choice as
cuts of meat, due to restaurants making what were cheap cuts
trendy.

Oh, and things like monkfish, no? TV chefs say 'buy this,
it's great and it's cheap!' and all of a sudden it is not
cheap at all. <g>

Yep, monkfish is a classic, unsaleable at a fishshop it was processed and
sold as mock scampi. Now its several times the price of real scampi. Lamb
shanks and pigs trotters are others.


I am hoping the mutton thing catches on a bit more - I know
it's smelly and all the rest but that doesn't stop it being
quite tasty. :-) My local butcher won't deal with the stuff
at all.

Despite Rick Stein and others banging on about it for years, it still
doesn't seem to be gaining much ground. It shouldn't be any more smelly than
properly hung beef (it shouldn't be hung as long as beef, 2 weeks from
memory).
Local butcher won't buy it, due to lack of demand (despite offering to take
a whole carcass)

<snip>
If it can't be fried or roasted it tends to puzzle
people I think - another side effect of supermarket
saturation. I can barely name cuts of meat, let alone
knowing which bit they were. <:-/

Being the son of a butcher might help. having worked in the
food industries
certainly helps, but most of my knowledge comes from
enjoying food and cooking.
Traditional butchers shops (I got dragged round them as a
kid <g>) used to have posters of food animals with cutting
diagrams and the various cuts all
neatly labelled. Wonder how that would play in supermarkets.

We had those in our Home Ec. department at school. No one
paid any attention to them. <:-/ I'd love to see them in
supermarkets actually. Did they not used to have them hanging
around the meat counter, years back?

Yep, that's the ones.


<snip>
Can't have it all ways though, if energy can be shuffled
about and passed around a system, if it can be used as we
want to use it, then surely the chemicals etc. in food
*must* make some sort of difference to the type of energy
we possess?

That's part of the basis of the whole organic movement.

I hear there's trouble there too. <wry g>

The only part that I know that has been scientifically proven

<raises one eyebrow, grins>

is that fresh
picked fruit and veg can be more nutritious than its
equivalent which is several days old. If nothing else that
should be an argument for eating food
grown on the land around you, rather than flown from half
way round the world. (and that ignores the transportation
impact on the environment).

<nods> You'd think it might tip people off when various
experts in a range of fora advocate eating local honey to
help with local hay fever. Can't be the only food that is
better local. :-)

<g> and it works,know several ex-sufferers from this route.


Stopping idiocy like transporting food several hundred miles
to eventually sell it three miles from where its grown would
help as well.

<nods> I see Waitrose have adverts now being smug about what
'local' means. They don't say whether local food is delivered
locally or taken to central distribution, mind you. They *do*
kind of imply that local food is all they do, which must be
wrong.

The global village makes everything local <wry g>
I have no waitrose in the area, so I can't go and check <eg>

I suspect Pterry might even approve.

Or be puzzled. <g>

That I doubt

I've remembered now, again, that he didn't want to be an
honorary Scot, so I've gone off the idea slightly. ;-)

Why would any one?
Be proud of what you are, and proud of others for what they are.
I know I want the border brought back down to Hadrian's Wall when Scotland
goes indepndent, but that would still make me a Northumbrian rather than a
Scot :~)

<snip>
[Grass, the lawn kind]
And chamomile lawns have declined in popularity.

Funnily enough, I'm attempting to grow one of those. Well, I'm
attempting to grow some chamomile on the windowsill just now,
to see how it goes. But I definitely want a lawn - if I can't
have a lawn full of wildflowers without them being called
weeds then I'm not having boring old weed-controlled grass.
;-)

Good luck,
May I suggest the following for consideration alongside the chamomile;
Salad burnet, white clover, crow garlic, yarrow and various thymes.
I've probably forgotten a few others, the original rcommendation for these
came from a guy who had recreated chamomile lawns at a couple of stately
homes, but had a salad and healing herb lawn at home.
From memory the problem with chamomile was the large number of relatively
expensive plants to achieve decent cover or the years of cultivation to get
the effect.

<snip>
Always thought apple should go well as pig food.

Should do, eh? I hear too many apples as feed can cause
problems with fermentation though, but I can't recall whether
that's cows or pigs that get drunk. <g>

Pissed pigs in cider sauce, now there's an inspiration for a recipe.

<snip>
Yes. <:-/ Will we move on from our unquestioning belief in
science, I wonder? We did from religion, for the most part.

When we revert to religion?

Oooh I hope that doesn't happen. <:-(

We could hope for an age of rationallity instead (rather than an age of
rationalisation)

<snip>
Good point. I have noticed a lot of tins of coconut milk
available these days though... Does palm oil come from
coconut trees too?

Funnily enough it comes from the oil palm tree. Though it may well be
related, its the other vegetable oil (coconut being the first) that is high
in saturated fats.


Though from memory there were major breakthroughs in
Bougainville in using coconut oil as an oil replacement.

Oil replacements are good, but wholesale change to
vegetable-based oils is going to bring its own problems,
isn't it?

Doesn't everything.

[waste uplift]

Fortnightly rubbish collections here, with a recycle wheelie
bin alternate weeks. It seems to work

Same here - a friend did see two rats in her bin, but it
wasn't overflowing and she does live next to the railway. I
can see that there are public health concerns and that living
in our own middens is not exactly the modern civilised way,
but we have it kind of easy because the rubbish goes in a bin
then ceases to be our problem - unless the council build a
landfill next door or something. As a population we're kind
of divorced from that aspect of the food cycle too.

Yep, we've become remarkably good at insulating ourselves from
inconveniences like that.

Jymn


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Poor, pathetic lobbyist...
    ... I support change for the better in Cuba. ... a country that needs WFP food aid. ... The only genocide in Cuba is a result of your beloved embargo. ...
    (soc.culture.cuba)
  • Re: RAISE THE MINIMUM WAGE TO $120 AN HOUR!!
    ... and it would mean that low wage workers wouldn't have to ... > Because the company's profits go to the owners of the company. ... This is what food stamps do as well. ...
    (sci.econ)
  • Re: Cuba embargo popular, new poll indicates
    ... >>> can even be seen as a form of genocide. ... tiny circle of fanatical Cuba haters is buying into them. ... for 84% of the rationed food and 80% of overall food on food imports. ...
    (soc.culture.cuba)
  • Re: Whatever prayers and recipes you can muster
    ... Apparently surgery hasn't affected his appetite. ... Half a sandwich & and a ramekin of vegetable soup was about all ... "insurmountable" pile of food on the days when just picking up a fork ...
    (rec.food.cooking)
  • Re: OT: Life in the 1500s...where some sayings come from
    ... Don't throw the baby out with the Bath water.. ... It was the only place for animals to get warm, ... Meat was indeed scarce for the poorest peasants, ... The food situation was much different in the homes of well-to-do ...
    (rec.gambling.poker)