Category: Food & Drink

Price Points

Food & Drink

Snappy rejoinder #257:

I was reminded of this when I paid my monthly visit to the butchery (Hirsch’s Meats in Plano) a few days ago.

Some background:  Hirsch makes South African boerewors (farm sausage), and they make it really well, to a recipe provided to them by a South African customer as a special order, but which turned out to be a gold mine for them when they made more and put it for sale in the freezer.  Unsurprisingly, they have a large clientele of Seffricans, and one of the basket characteristics (told to me by Nancy Hirsch) is that it is the only product in their freezer which is bought in multiples — i.e. more than one pack per customer.  I usually buy four at a time, which yields 12 boerewors sausages for my monthly consumption (New Wife doesn’t eat boerewors, never has, so I have them all to myself yum yum).

Now these are not your typical skimpy things like Nathan’s or Oscar Meyer hotdogs.  Even after cooking, these are monsters and sometimes I can’t eat a whole one in a bread roll, but have to slice it longitudinally in half to be able to finish it.  (The other half goes into the fridge for next day’s brekkie.)

Now this stuff is not cheap.  A pack of three boerewors costs about $7.50 – $8.00, which sounds expensive and it is, but it’s a delicacy, made by hand (because of the very specific recipe) and as such very much worth the money.  So I typically buy those four packs with a total ring of about $32.

Until the last time I went into the butchery, and discovered that the packs now cost $11 each.

So from now on, I’ll only be buying three packs at a time, yielding nine sausages for the month instead of twelve.  Same amount of money, three-quarters of the product.

Which, by the way, is what I told the folks at Hirsch.

Look, I understand the business of retail product pricing;  when it comes to foods, I understand it as well as anyone on the world because I did little else but study things like price elasticity and promotion pricing, for well over forty years.

But the plain fact of the matter is that now in my sunset years, I can no longer afford just to pay whatever the price sticker demands.  I have a (very) fixed amount of money I can pay for groceries, which means that at some point, I have to cut back — as above — and make do with less.  Fortunately, New Wife is an outstanding cook, so making meals from scratch and eating stews, curries and pasta dishes instead of boerewors hot dogs is not that much of a sacrifice, believe me.

But here’s the thing:  once a year I host the family Christmas dinner (on Boxing Day and not the 25th), in which I myself prepare a prime rib roast.  In the past, that prime rib has always come from Hirsch’s Meats because I’m not prepared to stint on quality for what is, even more than Thanksgiving, our family’s premium gathering of the year.

Well, this year and probably for the entire future, that prime rib roast will be coming not from Hirsch but from Walmart — something which I also told the Hirsch people.

Sic transit emptor.

Welcome Expansion

Food & Drink

Oh be still, my beating heart:

High street food chain Greggs is to open its first pub serving exclusive beers and a menu featuring its classic bakes and sausage rolls.

Just when I thought there was no reason ever to visit Britishland again, they do this to me.

Then again, this first (and so far only) Greggs-based pub is opening in Newcastle-On-Tyne, which exists in my mind simply as a railway station one passes through en route to Edinburgh.

But… beer and Greggs sausage rolls?

Back, Satan;  back, I say.

It’s just a Good Thing Greggs didn’t open their first pub in Devizes, Wilts.

The combination of steak bakes, sausage rolls and pints of Wadworth 6x… [exit, drooling]

Never Mind That Yellow Snow

Bad News, Food & Drink, Health

…watch out for the radioactive shrimp instead:

The Food and Drug Administration is warning U.S. consumers not to eat certain frozen shrimp products sold at Walmart over concerns they contain radioactive isotope Cesium-137.

In a press release Tuesday, the FDA said they were investigating reports of Cs-137 contamination in shipping containers and frozen shrimp being imported by Indonesian company BMS Foods after it was detected by customs officers at four US ports.

Now to be sure, this is being done in an excess of caution:  there’s no actual proof that WallyWorld sold any radioactive shrimp, and the levels are well below what the FDA considers as harmful.

But if you’ve got that big shrimp boil scheduled for the weekend family reunion and you bought the stuff from Sam’s Club or its cousin, you may want to consider replacing it from somewhere else.

#WoodstockBrownAcidWarning

Not Wanting

Food & Drink

In a recent poll taken among two thousand Gen Z Brits, the following are ones that these kids refuse to eat, ranking by the negative percentages, so to speak.

Liver (35% refuse to eat)
Blue cheese (32%)
Anchovies (30%)
Black pudding (29%)
Prawns (26%)
Duck (25%)
Tofu (23%)
Mushrooms (23%)
Olives (23%)
Plant-based cheese (21%)

My take, as a Boomer:

Liver — as a rule, I prefer liver in pâté form, but I love me some deep-fried chicken livers, with a passion.
Blue cheese — by itself, a tad strong;  crumbled over a burger:  yummy.
Anchovies — whether on toast or on pizza, I’ll eat them any day of the week
Black pudding — ugh.  The best thing you can say about black (i.e. “blood”) pudding is that it’s tasteless.
Prawns — or as we Murkins call them, shrimp:  love ’em.
Duck — little oily, but tastier than chicken.  (Duck fat, by the way, is the ultimate cooking ingredient.)
Tofu — nope.  Not ever.
Mushrooms — are you kidding me?  I must eat mushrooms of one sort or another at least three times a week.  My favorite:  a substitute for a bun in a hamburger (giant Portobella fried in butter, oh my).
Olives — nope.  Not ever.
Plant-based cheese — LOL, forget that shit.

The Daily Mail  article which fostered this post had the usual scare headline — “These Foods Are Going To Disappear!!!!!”

#

…but I don’t think we need to panic.  If it were only true of olives (never gonna happen), tofu (ugh) and that strange plant cheese (we can but hope, plus all “plant-based” meats), I’m fine with the prognosis.

Lubricant

Food & Drink

This is an unusually level-headed look at drinking in moderation, and I for one applaud it.  A sample:

For four years I was teetotal and socializing was always a pain. At parties, small talk was so small, I never felt that anything ever connected, or that there was an actual point to talking. It was so superficial – the weather, my journey, my clothes, the articles I’d just written.

It’s why at a work event not long ago, instead of asking for my usual lemonade, I grabbed a glass of Prosecco from the bar. For a moment I imagined a bolt of lightning would come down from the sky. Was I really going to throw away four years of sobriety? And for what? Because I was… bored?

Well, yes I was. And immediately I felt bonded to this room of relative strangers. Not in a creepy way. Just in a way that made it easier for me to chat to them. It was fun.

And that’s what people miss about the whole booze thing.  Not for nothing is booze called a social lubricant:  it makes people less inhibited, more relaxed, and to be frank, more fun to be with.  But before I go any further, I’m going to make a definitive statement about the above.

The key phrase is:  in moderation.

The problem is that when it comes to booze, most people can’t do moderation — and this is particularly so when it comes to drinking beer in Britishland (an imperial pint is a lot of booze) and drinking short drinks (spirits) in the U.S., where spirits are free-handed out of the bottle by bartenders, making the drinks far too strong.

Unless you’re a fool or addict, the object of drinking booze is not to get pass-out drunk;  it’s to release some of those social inhibitions, to lower the social guards people put up in self defense, and quite frankly, to get a little “buzz” on — because that buzz is really, really pleasurable.

The key, speaking as one who was once a serious boozer and is now a lot less so, is drinking just enough to get that buzz and maintain it.  In my considerable experience, it means that one needs to drink a smaller glass of beer — the much- derided “half-pint” in the U.K. — and to drink it in the same time as one might take to drink a full pint, i.e. more slowly.  For spirits, it means not accepting the overly-generous pour of the bartender, but watering the drink down with a mixer or water.  (If I order a spirit like a G&T at a bar in the U.S., I order the gin straight, and request a three-quarter-filled glass of tonic plus ice on the side — i.e. in a different glass — and pour half the gin into the tonic to treat that as my drink.  Then when that is finished, I order another glass of tonic, and pour the remainder of the gin into that — two drinks for the price of one, and as the evening goes on, I will end up drinking half of what a regular person would.)

And before I hear people saying that the drink tastes “weak” or “watery”, let me say that this is precisely the point.

Let’s be honest, for once.  Most booze tastes like shit.  Remember that time long ago when, after watching your dad or whoever drink beer with all the pleasure in the world, having your first beer and discovering what it actually tasted like?  Horrible, wasn’t it?

Of course, the more you drink, the more the taste of booze is acquired;  and as one gets older, one’s palate becomes more sophisticated, which is why we no longer eat canned Vienna sausages, “blue-box” mac ‘n cheese and drink sugary Kool-Aid.  (And if you still enjoy that stuff, I don’t want to hear about it.)

I love booze.  I love the taste of it, I love the way it makes me feel and I love the way it makes other people feel (if they’re drinking like I’m drinking);  but I’m also extremely wary of the perils of over-indulgence — the consequence of a.) becoming an adult and b.) becoming, like the author of the above piece, less able to deal with the hangovers that follow said over-indulgence.

As I’ve said many times before, I can’t drink by myself and never have been able to.  Booze is a social lubricant, and if you need a social lubricant when you’re on your own, you’re in trouble.  And as Anniki Somerville ends her article:

At one party I sit next to a friend and she whispers to me: ‘You’ve changed. I feel like you’re more on my level again.’ And that is what having a couple of drinks can do. Get everyone on the same level so they can connect.

That’s what my four years of sobriety taught me: so long as you’re keeping to guidelines, a glass of wine can be part of the solution to life’s stresses, not the cause of them.

Precisely.

Nice Try, Nerds

Food & Drink, Science!

Another breathless warning from some joyless dorks:

Whether it’s a mature cheddar or a crumbly feta, cheese is one of the most beloved foods around the world.  But in news that will concern fans of the moreish treat, scientists have issued an urgent warning about eating cheese. 

For the first time, a groundbreaking study has revealed that these dairy products are ‘ripe in microplastics’.  Scientists believe the tiny plastic particles, measuring 5mm or smaller, could be entering cheese at various stages of production.  Their analysis revealed that the most contaminated products were ripened cheeses – those aged for more than four months – with a staggering 1,857 plastic particles per kilogram.

For comparison, that means a ripened cheese contains around 45 times more microplastics than bottled water.

Yeah, and 45 times “pretty much zip” is still close to nothing.

Since plastics contain chemicals known to be toxic or carcinogenic, scientists are concerned that a buildup of microplastics could damage tissues in our bodies.

“Could”.  Yeah, well at my age I pretty much don’t care, because at some point something’s going to kill me off anyway.  And seeing that these microplastic thingies are pretty much ubiquitous in all food types, I’ll just carry on eating this, my favorite kind of food.

Your opinion may vary, and I don’t care.