Knackers' Yard Catering

100% beef, 100% Findus

Findus. As in: find us anovver 'orse, we've rhan aht over 'ere. Spectacular phone in calls while I was driving this morning. There was a “you want four burgers for a quid, what do you expect, luv?”. He didn't add the benefits / council flat / unmarried mother lines, at least not on air. “You wanna go dahn the butchers” he said. I agree, but it is more expensive there, where meat is properly hung, processed, and there isn't the false impression of value when you're paying £lots / lb for injected water.

There was a chemically anal guy who gave an in depth description of reclaimed meat (or whatever it's called): “they spray what's left after everything that a knife can cut has been removed with a solvent, then reconstitute the slurry”...he implied that there was very little left after the knife. Try buying meat on the bone and cutting away every scrap you can. I get my best stock from chicken thighs. I'm a right tightwad in that respect, but there's always plenty left on the bone to flavour and enhance the stock. No matter how hard I try. … “they use a chemical that dissolves the cartilage, the connective tissue, anything with protein in it...”

There's one central core of the argument. In global terms, meat eating has had it's day, it has become indefensible and unstainable. You can either grow stuff and eat that, or grow a million times more stuff (or thereabouts, let's not get pedantic on the figures) and feed that to animals, and then eat them, with all the methane production, inhumane (and inhuman) methods that come into play when there's a quick buck at the end of the (post-slash-and-burn) rainbow. If there are qualms about extracting every last ounce of protein from a carcass, and the bloke on the phone spat out the words 'cartilage' and 'connective tissue' as if these were the end of the world, then don't kill and eat the things. There's a big difference between chucking your own chickens, pigs, whatever, your peelings and leftovers together with some feed, then putting them in the pot, and the sort of massive scale factory production behind supermarkets and burger chains, operating without regard for welfare or ecology.

Then there came a lady. Worked in Belgium. Now I'm autistic, unable to empathise, and prone to roughshod-riding. This lady said she'd eaten horse, and, at the third or fourth attempt, answered the interviewer: “how did it taste?” “well, they [the Belgians (scamps)] didn't tell me the first time...” She went on to say how it all tasted OK and what was the fuss about? OK, lady, if flesh is flesh and a joke's a joke, then what if those jovial pranksters had said 'dog' for 'horse'? Or cat? Or “well, it was bury him or eat the bugger...”

Heh! Didn't taste the difference did you? No harm done then. Pork casserole, we'll call it.

Findus said: “weren't us, guv, was a naughty third party supplier.” Way to keep your nose clean, Findus. Profit? Badge up third party supplier stuff as your own. Going wrong? Not us, mate. It's that dodgy old third party playing up. I Googled Findus: “You can trust us” it says. To say beef and sell horse? “We use only the best ingredients and a generous pinch of imagination in our recipes...” that'd be racehorse (the best ingredients) and pretend it's beef (the imagination), then?

I'm not innocent here, either. Not in a Hannibal way. No cannibalism. I have served conger eel as 'white salmon', and ox heart brochettes, as just brochettes. Wrong, I know. In my defence I plead a strong preference for anyone who says “that's delicious. What is it?” to those who ask what everything is because that will decide whether or not they like it. I had the great misfortune of sharing a dim sum meal with BLISS' relatives, and every steamer basket, every plate and every bowl was met, not with “smells good, mmm, what's this one?” but a suspicious “what's this / what's in this” forensic examination that sucked all joy from the occasion.