The food issue

Headache? Tense, nervous headache?

Try a tin of delicious and nutritious savoury corned beef from ASDA. It comes with added free painkiller. For horses.

Actually, at less than four parts per billion, you’d have to scoff an awful lot to have any real effect. It would take so long to eat enough to have any effect, that by then your headache will probably have gone away in any case.

Enough to cause a fuss, though. The chippie is also under food police attack…

Cod and chips, or a load of pollocks?

Look, food police, chip shop fish does not taste of very much. That’s the idea, I think. Mackerel, herrings, tuna, swordfish, salmon, they all have pronounced and definite flavours, and you don’t get them down the chippie, where the normal choice is cod or haddock.

Both splendid fish. Won’t have a word said against them. But they need baking in paper with flavourful additions and seasonings, or grilling with an enriched butter, or frying in a tasty batter, plenty of salt and malt vinegar, or copious amounts of lemon juice and tartar sauce. Chips. They need chips, too.

So on occasion ‘cod’ is haddock. Or whiting or Pollock. 7%. That’s not enough to worry about, is it?

The tests were done, and the reports published by Stefano Mariani of Salford University, who needs to get a life, find something more worthwhile to do with his time, or at least realise that having bought a delicious and nutritious portion of cod and chips, the right thing to do is to hammer it with salt, slather it with vinegar, and get it down your neck, not over to the lab.

I doner understand

The doner kebab. A meal so mucky you have to be three sheets to the wind to even think about it. Surely the lab rats are crawling over each other to analyse one?

The Guardian published a DIY version. Minced lamb breast (coarse), breadcrumbs and seasonings, the re-minced (fine), and cooked in the oven, in a clingfilm-lined tin can, slowly, in a bain marie, then blasted with a blowtorch…yes, too much fuss ‘n’ bother, you could’ve been down to Ossie’s Taverna by now…before cutting off those thin slices.

God knows what’s on those oversize skewers. Intuition suggests whatever it is, it’s nothing too pure. Not that the proud owner of a post-pub doner is likely to be too concerned about the purity of the contents. A greater worry is the possibility of bland, or insufficient chilli sauce.