Author: Kim du Toit

Fish Footprints

Eco-Crap, Food & Drink

Is there any possible part of our daily life that isn’t going to be measured by this bullshit metric?

Fish sticks may seem harmless, but the tiny food is creating a huge carbon footprint.
A new study has found that transforming Alaskan Pollock into fish sticks, imitation crab and fish fillets generates nearly twice the greenhouse gas emissions produced by fishing itself.

I’m getting to the point where the more I’m scolded for behavior which (allegedly) harms the planet or in some way offends people of a certain type, the more I’m likely to increase said behavior.

I’ve never been that keen on fish sticks — I think I grew out of the taste at age 8 — but I think I’ll pick up a pack or two of Gorton’s the next time I’m at the supermarket, just for spite.

And then there’s this, from the same article:

Families that often dine out and consume large quantities of sweets and alcohol are likely to have a higher carbon footprint than meat eaters, a study claims.
Researchers came to this conclusion after studying the food habits and carbon footprints of around 60,000 households across Japan.
They found that meat consumption typically only accounts for only 10 per cent of the different in environmental impact between low and high carbon households.
In contrast, households with high carbon footprints typically consumed around two to three times more sweets and alcohol than those with low footprints
Eating out, for example, was found to contribute 175 per cent more carbon emissions for the average household than eating meats.
In fact, dining in restaurants was seen to contribute an annual average of 770 kilograms (121 stone) of greenhouse gases towards the environmental impact of those households with a high carbon footprint.

That does it.  Tonight is Pizza Night chez  Du Toit (which is an immutable institution), but tomorrow night I think I’ll take New Wife to Hard Eight BBQ, which boasts a meat smoker that puts out more smoke than a fucking 19th-century steamship.

Chide me, I dare ya.

There Goes The Neighborhood

Food & Drink, Modernism

And another treasured institution falls over:

The Full English breakfast could die out within a generation because almost one in five young people living in the UK have never eaten a fry-up.
Despite being a mainstay of British society since the Victorian era, a nationwide study has revealed 17 per cent of British people under 30 have never tucked into the greasy breakfast food.
Millennials are avoiding the traditional meal due to health concerns, with a fifth of 18 to 30-year-olds saying they associate the dish with heart attacks and obesity.
The majority would prefer to have smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, smashed avocado on toast or oatmeal pancakes for breakfast over the Full English.

Here’s what they’re missing, the little shits:

Great Caesar’s bleeding hemorrhoids… how could this sublime creation be replaced by something that looks like calcified sputum on toast?

My own kids (Millennials all) would smother me in my sleep if I were to offer them this slop instead of a Full English on Christmas Day — or any day, come to think of it — but then they’re not Brits, are they?

I don’t want anyone to think that I’m unalterably set in my ways (“No, Kim!  Say it ain’t so!”) — I mean, the last time I had breakfast at Fortnum & Mason, I even had a delicious Duck Rarebit (fried duck egg on hot beer cheese over a piece of toast, as below):

…so I am open to a bit of change — I just don’t want the thing I temporarily changed from  to disappear because some pasty-faced weenies think it’s unheaaaaalthyyyy!

Let me promise you all one thing:  if the time comes when I go over to Blighty, go out for brekkie and find the Full English has disappeared from the menu, there will be murders.  Just the prospect  of “avo toast” on a breakfast table makes me feel weak.

Is it too early for a pint of gin?  I think not.

Pub Culture

Culture, Good Stuff

Tom Utley (one of my all-time favorite columnists) waxes rhapsodical about the revival of pubs in Britishland:

This week’s cheering news is that after years of precipitous decline, the number of pubs and bars opening in the UK has outstripped closures by 320 in 2019. So says an analysis of labour market figures from the Office for National Statistics.
…
Indeed, as I may have written before, my idea of heaven on Earth is an English village pub — ideally at least a couple of centuries old, with a thatched roof and a low ceiling supported by gnarled oak beams. On winter evenings, there should be a blazing log fire to greet us (sorry, Greta Thunberg) and a labrador stretched out on the hearth (‘just taking the dog for a walk, dear’).
On summer afternoons, there will be trestle tables out at the front, from which customers can watch the cricket on the village green or just listen to the drone of the bees in the roses above the door.

Of all the things I miss about being in the UK (and one of the very  few things I miss about living in South Africa) would be the weekly evening visit to the pub and / or the daily lunchtime visit thereto during the work week.  Lest anyone has forgotten, this was my “local” when I was variously staying with Mr. Free Market and The Englishman:

I desperately want to have a “local” Over Here, but we don’t have a pub culture:  ours is more a “get wasted after work” culture (not that this is altogether a Bad Thing, of course, but people don’t generally cluster around the pub (okay, bar) around these parts as a social venue).  The closest I’ve found is the Londoner in Addison, and it’s not close at all — a 20-minute drive away, assuming no traffic.

There is the Holy Grail a few steps from my apartment, which has excellent food but a somewhat patchy collection of ales — from week to week, they’re likely to be out of whatever I had the previous  week, which gets old very quickly — and as the website pics will show, it’s too damn big and very noisy.  (Aside:  why are  Americans so loud?  Is it because they have to shout to be heard above the earsplitting music/game on the TV?  Never mind:  that’s a rant passim.)

One thing, though, about Utley’s article:

It is run not by an ever-changing cast of managers on their way up the career ladder but by permanent fixtures in the community — landlords and landladies who have lived on the premises for years, know all the local gossip and are ready with their regulars’ preferred tipples, without having to be told (‘The usual, Tom?’).

Yeah, but that’s also a double-edged sword.  While an independent innkeeper can occasionally be persuaded to whip up a makeshift plate of sandwiches outside regular food-service hours, he could also be a cantankerous old fart, as per this story of Mr. Free Market, who arrived at his local one afternoon with a crowd of business friends and associates, and begged that the pub be opened to accommodate over fifty thirsty customers, to be met with the withering response:  “Fuck off;  I’m watching Corrie!” (Coronation Street).  Not yer model of customer service, innit?  And as the owner, he wasn’t going to get fired, either.

So there ya go.

All that said, I miss having a real local — but a place “where everybody knows your name” seems to have become a figment of TV fiction, hasn’t it?

I envy Tom Utley.

Messypants

Beauty

Apparently, Nigella Lawson is a “mess magnet”, and her house is filled with stuff because she suffers from “shortage dread”.

As do I.

I draw the line at dozens of empty mustard jars, although New Wife has stashed a few such empty jam jars packed away.  (Curiously, a few actually came in quite handy over Christmas, as we filled them with Reese’s Pieces and M&Ms and gave them to the kids as stocking stuffers.)

I have no problem hoarding things like foodstuffs, but empty toilet roll cylinders and the like need to be turfed out, toot sweet.  I think I’ll offer my ahem  services to Nigella, as long as she has a few bowls of pasta first.  Here’s a before/after comparison:

  Q.E.D.