Life's a Hoot

Lunchtime retail therapy - some old (not sure of age) silver cufflinks I spotted in the window of one of me favourite antique and curios shops. Needed. Work feels... Stressed...

That was stage one of 'cheer up' today; stage two was a rather nice simple dinner of pheasant with orange sauce and rocket with goose-fat roasties. Aye. That'll do the job as well.

Oh, and stage 3 was one beer. Just the one. But blessed was the beer.

And relax. Sort of.

By the way, the whole horse meat in burgers thing in the UK just now... If you're going to eat meat (as I do) and you're going to buy 'value meat (as I don't) then you can get all squeamish about horse meat all you want, but I'd be more worried about just which off-cuts of the cow were in those burgers to make them so cheap, and which weird additives are in there to make them last so long. Get off your high horse (if you'll pardon the pun), I'm pretty sure most people don't eat horse because it's a pretty cow. We're odd that way. I ordered eel in a restaurant once and telling people they were sticking tongues out and comedy retching. Which is odd. Because it's a fish. That's all. Why is the eel 'orrid; and the cod lovely?

You can argue that horses are 'intelligent', but that's to be downgrading the intelligence of cows, and most certainly of pigs (if you eat pork). Yes, the labelling should be clear, and people were eating what they shouldn't - I find it more abhorrent that people who don't eat pork for religious reasons have unwittingly been duped into offending themselves, rather than some strange 'horror' of someone who is perfectly willing to eat meat of incredibly dubious quality and with likely very dubious animal care pre-slaughter (and possibly during slaughter).

And most people aren't actually complaining about the labelling, because the proportion of burgers found with traces of pork is much much higher than those found with horse traces - yet there isn't a single headline shouting "Burgers found to contain pork!", because pork is socially acceptable.

So what we have is media scare-mongering and misleading; added to hypocrisy and forced disgust of the public; to make one non-story hang about our front pages. In short. If you want to make sure your beefburgers have beef in them, buy good beefburgers. Or even better, buy some good quality mince and make your own. It doesn't take long, and believe it or not it will actually be cheaper than buying a packet of frozen Findus. But that wouldn't be a story now would it?