Category Archives: Food

The Curious Case of Canadian Marmite.

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As many of you may know, I am something of a Marmite addict. If you don’t know what Marmite is there are plenty of references on the Internet and if you are an Antipodean who is already looking for the comment box so you can tell me that Vegemite is better than Marmite then don’t, I am not talking about Australian Marmite which is completely different than British Marmite so the chances are high that you have never actually tasted proper Marmite otherwise you wouldn’t be talking such nonsense.

Anyway, all that aside, I had been convinced that the Marmite you can buy in Canada, although it is made by the same company and in the same packaging is watered down. It’s the wrong colour for a start. Canadian Marmite looks like diarrhoea and doesn’t have the translucent inner glow of British Marmite. I thought I was going mad, why would there be a difference? Tonight, I came across some old packages of British Marmite I had nicked from a hotel in Norwich in 2003 so I finally had a comparison.

Firstly… Hotel packets of British Marmite:

marmite0

(Yes, I know the sell-by date is 2005, we will ignore that. It’s not like Marmite changes over time).

Now Canadian Marmite:

marmite1

(You can tell it’s Canadian, it has English and French labels, so no cheating here).

Now some anaemic toast:

marmite2

(Yeach, do people really eat toast this colour?)

And now, the Marmite on a knife:

marmite3

I may as well have stopped here really – It’s obvious that they are completely different. In the interests of Science, however…

The Marmite on toast:

marmite4

I have no idea WHY Canadian Marmite is so completely different. It costs pretty much the same in Canada as it does in Britain. It doesn’t taste bad, it’s just a little weaker and you have to spread a lot more; plus there is that whole bodily fluid thing going on with it. People who may claim that the 2003 Marmite is blacker because it is old, well you will just have to trust me. I could have used the British Champagne Marmite which is just as black but that wouldn’t have been like-for-like.

There is no conclusion to this. I just figured that rather than waste a posting ranting about Google I may as well expose this curious Marmite Conspiracy.

I can has vegan beefburger?

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I read the most amazing article today about McDonalds admitting it was adding milk and wheat to their french fries. (Can we call them chips now please? This is an English Weblog – In fact where I come from they fry them in beef fat anyway).

Admittedly, I find it a tad strange that McDs are adding such things to their chips but that’s not my problem with the article. My problem is with comments such as:

“I am vegan. I have eaten their vegetable burger with fries for many years. I will never do it again. I really hope their vegetable burgers were animal free.”

What? What fucking delusional vegan would eat at McDonalds anyway? I can understand if they were forced in there once and had to eat something to be social or because they were starving but come on, this one has eaten there “for many years” and not had the nouse to actually check with McDonalds that their stuff was animal free? This is McDonalds, not some trendy vegan restaraunt in Covent Garden.

Then it struck me… Half way down the article there is a quote:

“Nadia Sugich, a vegan, is also suing McDonald’s. Vegans do not eat any animal products at all (vegetarians include dairy and eggs in their diet, vegans don’t). Had she known the product contained milk she would not have touched them.”

Silly me – How did I miss that? It’s just an excuse to sue somebody. Obviously these people expected a certain duty of care and dedication to their high standards of vegan care FROM A FUCKING HAMBURGER SHOP!

Well I am sorry and I have no issue with most vegans, but in this case I hope the courts force them to pay costs and tell them to fuck off and get a life.

Accuracy be damned!

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I don’t see myself as a Luddite but something about the obsession for accuracy these days is starting to piss me off. When I was being educated, on the occasional times I deigned to attend that is, there was always some bright spark who could quote Pi to god knows how many decimal places. To my mind, Pi is generally 3.14 – Usually, I am more than happy with Pi being 3.

Bear with me, this is going somewhere.

It’s all the fault of the sodding electronic calculator. See back when I was younger than I ever really was, there were slide rules, and a slide rule looked like this:

sliderule-pi.jpg

I appreciate that many people reading this won’t have ever used a slide rule in anger, but the principal behind them is that most of the time, you more or less guess the answer, as opposed to have it displayed to 9 decimal places in monocolour LCD lettering. Look up a little from here… See the third scale down? Just to the right of the 3? There’s Pi marked. It’s marked roughly between 3.1 and 3.2 – It’s about 3.15 in fact. If you want to multiply Pi by 3 you pop the two numbers together on the correct scales and read off about 9.45 on the result scale; if you want to multiply it by 30, you multiply that by 10 in your head… If you want to multiply it by 3 million, you do the same only with more zeroes and your error rate has gone up considerably, but it doesn’t matter much really, does it?

Why is this annoying me? Apart from the fact that I want to shoot people who can quote Pi to more than 6 places? Well it’s the post office, that’s what it is. They have digital scales now, and when the parcel you are posting weighs 501 grammes, they charge you for over 500 grammes. Generally speaking by that point, I just rip a corner off and make them re-weigh it but even so, when did we become so obsessed with this “down the nearest gramme” accuracy? I don’t like it. Make them stop. I am not even going to start ranting about their new letter size measurement devices which very much depend on the operator’s skill at getting parcels through a little plastic measuring slot – Well I am not going to rant YET, at any rate.

I want markets back where they plonked stuff on scales and weighed it in pounds. If it was 4.4 pounds, and cost 30p a pound, they’d charge you about £1. 30 because that was roughly what 4.4 * 30 is (a slide rule would confirm this to you, if you were to ask it, especially a W.H.Smiths one with the little clear slider thing missing like most of them are these days). These days they pop things on digital scales, tell the scales that the things you want cost 78p per 100 grammes, and when it weighs 264.5g it prints a label that says £2.08 (yes, the bastards round it up too).

I blame the Common Market.

Fish Milk

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I had been pretty much ignoring recent milk adverts; after all, Milk is pretty much just Milk unless it is Wiseman’s “The One” which only has 1% fat but tastes pretty much the same as normal 4% milk. (No, this is not a sponsored post I just like the taste and the fact that it is purple).

Anyway,  I saw some of St Ivel’s new Omega-3 milk, reduced to 40p in Tesco last week so I decided that I may as well try it.

Fishmilk1

St Ivel, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that what milk really needs, is added Omega-3. Of course, being moderately sane I figured that they would make this tasteless but apparently, I was wrong.

The first thing I did with it was to make a Latte – I was still being naive here and I thought the fishy taste was just my imagination but then I had a pint of the stuff, cold and fresh. It tasted like herring in a milk sauce! I am not exaggerating, it really did.

Fishmilk2

I checked… I didn’t believe it so I took a photo of it because I knew you wouldn’t believe me either. St Ivel got perfectly good milk, straight from a perfectly happy and innocent cow, and then squeezed the innards of a fish into it.

I don’t think I can say any more, this is just madness! Mind you, the cats love it.

** Update: That last statement was a lie, they were just being polite because I was watching them. I just went back into the kitchen and the rest of has been left untouched by a pair of greedy felines who will eat just about anything; alive or dead.