Tag Archives: meat

33 Days To Go

I’ve just been counting. I have 33 more days in which I will hve to go to work. Eight of them will be half days. I have always hated those half days, as it never feels worth going into work for half a day. It isn’t a bonus half day off, as the shop owner seems to think, it’s a day wasted by the intrusion of a half day at work. The worst thing about working in the shop has always been the rotas (he loves sitting in his office working out complicated things) and the fact that even a “full day” is only six hours long. I go to work to earn money. My ideal week would be four ten hour days and three days off. Or five ten hour days.

Instead, the best I manged was, was five six-hour days. I actually looked at fitting in a second job around that in the days I was more active but couldn’t find one that fitted.

It’s nearly seven in the evening now and the day seems to have passed with nothing much happening. The kids have both been in touch for Mother’s Day, as we now call Mothering Sunday. I always thought it ws the day when servants were given a day off to visit their mothers, all the stuff about “mother churches” is new to me. It’s good to learn new things, but it’s a shock to find that something you thought you knew isn’t true.

We are treating ourselves to beef today. It’s a joint that we bought for Christmas as a back up in case the turkey supply let us down. It didn’t. However, as we need freezer space we decided it was time to break out the beef. I expect that after a couple of meals and several days of sandwiches we will start to think of fish and vegetables again. We’ve drifted off our vegetarian influenced diet a bit. It’s not that we want meat, or that we don’t want vegetables, it’s just that I find it hard to cook, and to chop vegetables, whilst my hands are bad. Even the sweeping motion of buttering bread for sandwiches is hard work, though it is getting easier.

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Thoughts about renewable energy

I watched The Apprentice last night.

At one time I used to watch in the hope that I might learn something about business. I’ve not learned anything I can use, though I do now know that every year proves there is a seemingly endless supply of idiots.

If I can find a way of converting idiots into electricity I may have found the next big thing in renewable energy.

Talking of which, we drove past another solar farm today.  It seems like every time we drive north from Nottingham we find another new field of black panels. Land use has changed considerably over the last ten years in North Nottinghamshire – first we had willow, then we had miscanthus. Currently we seem to have a small forest of wind turbines springing up and the latest fashion seems to be to cover acres in photovoltaic cells.

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Solar farm in north Nottinghamshire

When I see that I feel more comfortable about using electricity, but then start to worry that we won’t need it, because if we cover the land to generate electricity there will be no food to cook.

I’m a bit worried about food, after listening to a radio programme tonight. In order to halt global warming we need to scale back on meat production (mainly on account of the methane produced by cows) and would, they calculate, only have 19 grams of meat a day. That’s 133g a week, about the weight of two moderate burgers.

In the Second World War the bacon and ham ration ranged between 113 and 227 grams. However, there was also a meat ration, controlled by price – between 1 shilling and 1 shilling and two pence (5 – 6 pence in modern terms). I’m struggling to find a comparison of prices – one I found suggests that could be about £1.50. It’s not a lot, but compared to 19 grams a day it’s a positive feast.

To add to the complexity of looking into the future it also seems that grass fed beef (as generally reared in the UK) is worse for the environment than intensively raised beef fed on maize and soya (as raised in USA). It’s not about the method or the food, it’s about the fact that grass fed beef takes longer to grow to full weight, and thus spends more time emitting methane.

Now, methane is the main component of natural gas, so is it just me, or are other people thinking that some sort of gas-collecting nappy on a cow might be an alternative to fracking? Ah, just me…

That’s not the end to it of course, there’s also milk to consider. If they were telling the truth (and I fear they are) we will only have enough milk for four cups of tea a day.

Four cups of tea a day?

I could see myself as a vegetarian, but I don’t see myself cutting down to four cups a day.

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Under threat – my cup of tea

 

 

 

 

 

 

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