What does it mean to be an ‘artisan’ food producer?

A little while ago I wrote about the debasement of ordinary words and their exploitation for pure commercial advantage. Dominos Pizza leads the pack as it cynically pushes the ‘Dominos Artisan Pizza’ and presumably relies on no lesser authority than Lewis Carrol’s Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass: ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said [...]

The future of raw drinking milk hangs in the balance

Watching the Board of the Food Standards Agency (FSA) discuss the Microbiological Safety of Raw Drinking Milk (as agenda item 4.2 was titled) and the proposed review of controls at its meeting last month was really rather depressing and the outcome entirely predictable. The tone of the meeting was set when Tim Smith, Chief Executive of [...]

Lochmuir doesn’t exist, does it matter?

The debasement of ordinary words that have no legal protection has been common enough. Much has been written about the abuse of ‘real’ ‘homemade’, ‘natural’, ‘local’ and ‘artisan’ being but a few examples. Only a few days ago Marion Nestle wrote in The Atlantic posing the question ‘Is ‘Natural’ the Most Meaningless Word on Your [...]

Why vegetarians would eat veal

Reblogged from saffronbunny: Turn on the telly and you’re likely to catch a bearded man foraging on Channel 4 or a BBC fledgling MasterChef shouting about seasonal and local; look at your bookshelf and you’ve probably got at least one over-priced TV-endorsed cookbook which you’ve barely opened. Yet despite our recent ‘food renaissance’, some of [...]

The EDL march through Leicester

Hazel Paterson on yesterday’s EDL march through Leicester.

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