Guilty Pleasures

Alright, folks! Happy new year. That is new YEAR, as in singular. Americans and Canadians both have this annoying habit of saying "New Years" when, as far as I can tell, we only get one new year per year. Every time I got asked "What are you doing for New Years?" back in December, my eye twitched a little as I had to contain my anger before replying "I have no firm plans for Hogmanay yet, but it'll probably involve drinking too much and vomiting in the Canadian snow."

Anyway, that's not what I wanted to talk about today. I was going to talk about health care, but then I had to buy gin (as you do), so was going to talk about booze. But as you can only buy booze from a liquor store, I had to go elsewhere to get tonic and that inspired me to talk to you about food.

As you all know, I take my food very seriously. Although beer did contribute to my belly, it's hard to cycle to work every day and still be a fatty unless you have a serious love-affair with food. Which I do. As does my wife: we're basically tall hobbits with less-hairy feet. Hell, we even live in a basement apartment with a low roof, making it the quintessential modern-day hobbit-hole!

When we first arrived in this great country of the free (so they tell me), one of the first things we had to do was (obviously) a food-shop. If you ever visit a USian supermarket for the first time, what will become immediately obvious is that either Americans LOVE processed food, or the supermarkets force it upon them. The initial supermarket visits were actually great contributors to our culture-shock.

Making real food at home is actually a life-style choice and not a way of saving money. Little jars of spices and herbs such as oregano or cumin are RIDICULOUSLY expensive. Even buying the cheap brands, a jar of oregano that costs around £1 back home will easily set you back $6 to $8 (£4 to £5.50) - I calculated that, to make a curry properly, it would have cost me over $70 in spices alone.

Vegetables can also be appalling over-priced. In September, when they were still in season, a pack of 3 bell peppers cost $4.99, more than twice the price in the UK. Compare this to processed food, where you can buy 10 microwaveable dinners for $10. Processed food is much cheaper, and even foods that should be natural have all sorts of crap added to them.

Trying to buy flour to make bread? Just simple, whole milled wheat can't be bought from the supermarket. What you can buy is a super-enriched ultramegacrappy flour, made to look like bleached white flour, or made to look like wholewheat flour. I guess it is the whole of the wheat grain. Want to buy a tin of tomatoes? You have to look long and hard to find one that's not had stuff added to it (especially salt!).

The meat can make me quite sad too - you should not be able to buy 0.5kg of beef for around £1. I'm guessing that the cow didn't have a particularly happy life. Battery chickens is bad, but the industial scale feedlots in this country have battery cows and pigs! Places like Whole-foods, the expensive organic hippy middle-class supermarket has a rating system where they tell you about the meat. They do quite well with selling grass-fed beef, but the best their chickens generally do is have the label that effectively says "we didn't keep it in a cage the WHOLE of its life...". This contrasts with Europe, which, on the 1st of January, finally enacted the law banning battery chickens. (Actually, Peter Singer wrote an interesting opinion piece about this for Al Jazeera.

Ah, how I miss Waitrose.

Of course, with all things in America, there's always a "but". Farmers' Markets can be pretty awesome - most weeks, Dom and I now chat with the man who raises the cows (mmm, Angus) and chickens that provide us with all the eggs and beef that we need. The animals have had a happy life, the meat isn't that expensive and, perhaps most importantly, the beef is bloody good and the eggs may well be the tastiest we've had. Yay for Walnut farm! And I found a company online that sells what are easily the highest-quality spices I've ever used, for less than we paid in the UK.

Ethnic shops are also a very good way of getting decent ingredients at reasonable prices - it is possible to eat very well / ethically, as long as you're prepared to do a bit of leg-work. The two things that I've still not found are easy supplies of "exotic" meat like lamb or any sort of game animal. The supermarkets have effectively won the battle against localism to the extent that there are no butchers within a 12 mile radius of our home and, I suspect, much further. Your choices are evil supermarket or buy straight from the farmer.

The other thing I can't find yet is a decent supplier of flour that is nearby. There are some suppliers around, but generally in far away states where the shipping would cost more than the flour itself - definitely nothing like Doves who would deliver 25kg sacks of flour direct to our door.

Hopefully I've firmly nailed my foodie credentials to the wall. Now for my confession. What got me thinking about writing this post was where I went after buying gin. We needed some tonic water, so I stopped at the 7-11 to get some.

What I also bought was a trashy hot-dog, which pretty much embodies the antithesis of everything I've been writing about. It was terrible: fluffy white bun with ground parts of animal best labelled as "miscellanous". It was terrible, yet strangely satisfying, maybe even because it was naughty. It kept me warm in our first proper snow-fall. Perhaps processed food and cheap calories do serve some purpose?