17:22 
No, don't go elsewhere because I'm ranting about food. This is important.
Today I bought a stock pot. I've been after one of these for a while. This one is a cheap one cos I'm broke, but it's still 8 litres. You see we like to use all of the animal carcass. We get a chicken, we eat the chicken, we make a chicken noodle soup out of the bones and gristley bits left over. Until recently I was having to use two of our largest pots because there just isn't space in one. We can make a chicken last almost a week this way. I was going to make a chowder out of the fish heads and skins I have sitting in a bag in the freezer, but decided that this week's budget couldn't stretch to the extra bits of fish and clams I'd need.
We thought that bunnies would be good, cos they're only a couple of quid each, but the very nice man at the organic butchers explained that they only sell wild bunnies (quite right too) and if no one has shot any recently, they don't get any in. So I asked for a couple of ham knuckles instead. He cut me off a couple of bits of a pig that very few people ever use. They have a lot of bone and fat on them, but they were each three times the size of one of my fists and only cost a quid fifty each. I got a couple of organic leeks and some organic carrots and onions from the market stall next door. Total cost around 6 quid. The knuckles, a whole onion (unpeeled), the leek trimmings, a couple of whole garlic cloves (unpeeled), a wobbly carrot that's not much good for anything else and some herbs have gone into my stock pot with 6 litres of water and some dead lamb bones that I gnawed through last night. That will boil for a while then I'll take out the veg, add some lentils and pinto beans and potato, a fresh carrot, some chopped onion and the leeks, and boil all that up and I'll have several days worth for two people for less than 10 quid.
No supermarkets were involved in the making of this meal. And I feel good about that, especially as if I'd gone to the supermarket I wouldn't have got local veg and it would have cost more. No extraneous packaging, no extraneous transport requirements. I even cycled in to the market.
It's not even as if it's a lot of bother. I'm stuck at home today because of the pain anyway, despite having a major desire to go walking in the rain, and the stock gets on with its thing while I sit here writing blog entries and fiddling about with the set up for the PTRA website I'm constructing, as well as getting some work done on my book. I might even look at some text books. While all that is going on I'm boiling some beetroot for the lamb and couscous salad I'm making. Another couple of days' worth of food for not very much money.
Why do people buy prepacked? Is it just convenience? I keep hearing that people are thinking more and more about what they eat and yet every time I stand in the check-out I see people overladen with three-cheese pizza and frozen lasagne. Often they are organic three-cheese pizza and vegetarian frozen lasagne, and I wonder if this is what is meant by thinking more about what one eats.
Sorry, but in my view eating organic is not a way to prevent one becoming polluted, it's a way of trying to encourage better farming practises that don't turn the countryside into blankets of monoculture. I will eat locally produced non-organic if I can't find local organic, because I think the transport requirements of shipping carrots thousands of miles in cooled freighters outweighss the benefits of them being organic.
I want to encourage good farming practises here, not just abroad. I also think it's terribly important to support British agriculture. Some people are growing up not realising that there are men and women tearing their hair out in despair attempting to make a living out of doing something that is fundamentally necessary - producing the food we eat.
I sometimes write letters.
Dear Sainsbury's,
I would just like to let you know that today I bought a French chicken despite my preference for local produce, because it looked like a chicken and not some caricature of a bird drawn by someone with a breast and thigh fetish, which is an accurate description of the birds on offer in your fresh meat section that are produced in this country. I would also like to inform you that today I bought some non-organic tomatoes, despite the range you have in the organic section and my normal preference for organic produce, because the organic tomatoes were grown in Argentina and we grow perfectly good tomatoes in this country.
Why oh why can we not have local organic produce on offer, when I know it is available? I am changing my purchasing habits to buy more of this type of produce from the local market, as I object to having my organic produce shipped across the world when there is plenty available from struggling local farmers. My main reason for buying organic is the environmental benefits, and the personal health benefits and improved flavour are merely an added bonus. I think you would find, if you did some research amongst those who think about these things as opposed to merely following the current fashion, that I am by no means alone in this.
However I would like to thank you for including British organic milk and eggs in your range.
Yours sincerely, etc |
I once even started a letter writing campaign playing off Tesco's and Sainsbury's, explaining to each that I had to shop at the other in order to get all the things I want. I don't know how much good it did, but I can now get most things in both when I couldn't before.
Of course, these days I'm trying not to shop for fresh stuff at supermarkets, for all the reasons I explained above.
I do think it's important, and not just because of the strange dietary restrictions that I live with, most of which are to do with respect for the things I eat. Frood thinks it's important too, and he can eat what he damn well pleases. We might not say prayers to thank the spirit of the beasts that we eat, but the entire process of obtaining them has a great deal of thought and consideration and careful pondering. There is respect for life in every point in that process, and that applies to the vegetable matter as well as the flesh. This is also why I prefer to joint my own meat, to clean my own fish, to get involved with the meat at a point where it is still recognisable as an animal. I just don't understand the attitude of people who say that they couldn't eat steak or lamb if they thought about where it came from, if it came as anything other than a pre-packed, sanitised lump of flesh with no clue to its origin. This is prime steak, not a hunk of dead cow. This isn't something that once meandered lazily about in a field with friends and munched grass.
Oh, but you see, oh squeamish pathetic one, it is. And it felt fear on its way to slaughter, and it bled when they butchered it, and the flesh was once warm.
I was in a pub in Herefordshire the other day and it had a sign on the wall proclaiming that they could produce the abbatoir records for the meat in your meal. I nearly cheered out loud. I expect the butcher I like so much (M. Feller, Son & Daughter, in Oxford's Covered Market) could tell me the name of the beasts he has hanging in his window. That's the way I like it.
One of the other Raven Brats sings to his food as he cooks it, to soothe it and acknowledge what he is doing. I don't do that, but that's not the point. The point is we care about our food - not in the sense of how good it is for us, but in the sense that it was once alive and had life, and it no longer has life because we wish to eat it.
That is terribly important to me. Respect for life doesn't have to mean never killing anything, it means taking responsiblity and acknowledging what one is doing and the gravity of it.
15:11
Today's soundtrack:
"The King and I"
"Album of the Year" - Faith No More
"Axis - Bold as Love" - Jimi Hendrix
I'm going bonkers. Stood in the supermarket, bemoaning to myself the need to get water filter cartridges because we don't own the house and can't put an in-line filter into the mains, and I did my usual thing of looking at what the other people in the queue were buying. The chap next to me had a loaf of organic bread, but he also had a pre-packed side-salad in a plastic container designed to look like a serving plate, you know, the kidney shaped ones you get in tacky restaurants. I nearly went for him. I had to work hard to sit on the rage I felt at these people, these stupid people buying stuff with unnecessary packaging. Why buy the prepacked tomatoes which have been shipped all the way from Spain when you can get exactly the same type loose, grown in the UK? I had to make a huge effort not to grab him by the throat and say "Why do you buy organic? Eh? Is it some selfish, misplaced idea that organic foods will prevent your body becoming polluted when the problem is a global one? Do you think that you will avoid being contaminated by eating organic when your consumer practices fill the atmosphere with fumes created by transporting these fruit and vegetables halfway round the world, when we grow them in this country?
I stood there and realised I have becom a misanthropic bitch recently. And it's getting worse.
I also realised recently that I don't like pagans. I really don't. I can't stand them. I hate the pretentious way they go on about god and goddess and religious tolerance, and how we should treat the Earth as a temple, but half of them still leave roaches and cigarette butts lying around at prehistoric monuments ("it's biodegradable, innit?") and look at you like you're mad if you suggest going to look at some carvings in a church, and claim all Christians are oppressive wankers responsible for all the bad things in history.
My best friends are pagan, but my best friends are also scientists, computer technicians, writers, good people. They aren't part of the "Pagan Community". They just happen to be pagan.
Pagans who are pagan before they are anything else, who do what they do because they think it's the sort of thing that a pagan should do, they get right up my nose, they really do.
Pagan feminists are even worse. Dear Ghods.
I so want to be someplace else. I dreamt last night about me and a bunch of friends, including Andy, taking amanita, and everyone else reacting really badly to it while for me it was just another day at the office of Weird Shit, and so I was running round with cartons of Libby's organic orange juice trying to get everyone to drink some to make them feel better (works for LSD) and wondering why I didn't have any atropine handy.
It's too hot here, I'm swollen up with the heat. Bright pink, irritable and aggressive. Felt like the system was trying to shift when the rain started earlier, I was standing in a car park at the time, could feel it responding to the change in weather, craving for the break in oppression that a good storm would bring, as if it could shift and bring it closer, but all that happened was that it shimmied around a bit at the edges. It couldn't follow through. The shift would start in a patch and then would die off before speading, but there were quite a few of these patches all trying to go at once. I'm trying to think of something to compare it to. I know I've seen a similar effect elsewhere, but I can't think where or what.
And my back hurts so badly.