The Glidd of Glood Blog

Give me a double helping of Fat Tax

A wringing of hands on Newsnight a couple of days ago, as projections are released that show that Britain will be bankrupt by 2040. That’s pretty grim news, but it’s not like being diagnosed with terminal cancer, although all the commentators seemed to think it was. You have to get a grip. Plenty of the workforce of 2040 haven’t even been born yet, so imagining that they won’t be able to do something about the economy looks to me like defeatist rubbish.

It is sad, if not pathetic, that Britain’s leaders have no vision for the future apart from cutting costs. There was much talk of how everyone’s lives are going to be less comfortable in the future. Nigel Lawson (as if we’d be interested in hearing what the ex-flabby chancellor had to say) spoke airily of increasing the retirement age to 70, now that we are all going to live so much longer. Someone ought to tell Nigel that only politicians and journalists are still employable at 70. Try to get a job these days if you are coming up to 50 and you’ll find your CV is quickly filed vertically in the bin. So that really amounts to the government paying more unemployment benefit and less pension. I wonder where the cost saving is in that.

You could, of course, think to yourself that if the country set out to have the best education in the world, fostered entrepreneurship and created the infrastructure that the working population requires, got behind the green economy and stopped exporting all jobs to China and other far away places, the future might look very different. But bean counters always prefer the cost-cutting option because it requires no imagination or creativity. It comes as no surprise that the imagination of professional politicians, who have never done anything much apart from swim in paper, seems stretched if asked to do anything more than create a fatuous soundbite.

There was much lamenting the fact that Britain wouldn’t be able to afford the National Health Service and you can see where this one is heading. Parroting the worn-out mantra that privatisation is the saviour of all aspects of government service, politicians are slowly thinking of dismantling the thing, bit by bit, doctor by doctor. In a decade or two’s time we will be told that it just isn’t possible to maintain it and it will be replaced by some private health insurance scheme.

Governments only have one source of revenue and that’s tax, so if they are strapped for cash, there is only one place to look for it. Recent talk has centred around a possible mansion tax on the buildings of the wealthy, but frankly, that ain’t gonna change the ball game.

I have a much better idea.

If Britain is becoming increasingly obese, and the BBC says that 61% of adults and 31% of children are overweight, then the health costs engendered by fat are rising. Indeed the Beeb quotes “experts” (ah, the famous experts) who think that in 10 to 15 years, 75% of the population will suffer health problems from being overweight.

We could just roll over (ho! ho!) and let it happen, or the government could do something about it. So far, their action has amounted to telling us to eat a balanced diet and getting Jamie Oliver to try and change a few school menus. Result: diddly squat. If the problem is increasing, then their “action” must be having no effect. After all, anyone who has seriously tried to do something about their weight sees results in a few weeks, so you have to think that the nation isn’t collectively doing anything at all about its.

Let me then add my voice to the other two people who are arguing for a fat tax. The idea is laughably simple: put a tax on processed, non-healthy foods. Use the proceeds to fund the NHS. You can’t lose. If it has no effect on behaviour (unlikely) then all the people stuffing their faces with pies, cakes, biscuits, chocolate bars, crisps and Fanta will finance the treatment of the future problems that their over-eating will cause. If they change their behaviour and become thin through avoiding all the heart-clogging goodies, the government may have less of a contribution to the Health Service but will have a lot fewer patients to treat. How can this not be a good plan?

There are those who see this sort of thing as the thin end of the wedge (of pizza). Why should the government meddle in your daily life and influence what you eat? This is a facile piece of non-reasoning. The government already makes it compulsory for you to wear seatbelts and crash helmets for your own good because otherwise you’d be so stupid as not to do so. Alcohol and cigarettes, neither of which do your health any real favours, are taxed. Drugs like weed, speed, ecstasy and cocaine are banned because of the harm they are deemed to cause you.

But drug taking is small beer compared to cakes, it now appears, when it comes to the nation’s health.

You might get the impression that I don’t like cakes, biscuits and crisps. You’d be wrong, though I hardly ever buy any. There are entire supermarket aisles that I just don’t ever visit. I don’t buy them because I know that if I did, I’d get fat, and I’d sooner be a thinnish and marginally frustrated non-cake-eater than a bloated biscuit nibbler.

Whilst I was about it, I’d tax ready meals too, since then the unsatisfying and salt-laden concoctions would become even more exorbitant with the result that the nation might even start cooking again. “Oh I don’t have the time,” people wail. Not strictly true that, is it? People have the time to Twitter incessantly and be on Facebook for hours, but not to chop up an onion. Whereas, if you did chop up a couple of onions and do a wee bit of cooking, you could invite a few Facebook friends around to eat it with you and have a real conversation without saying “lol” once. Hell, you could even laugh and joke without having to type ;)

Maybe the government could go one further and actually subsidise locally grown fresh produce, though it has to be said that parsnips, carrots and cabbages (and onions) don’t actually break the bank.  It can’t be a problem of cash anyway. The reason people are fat is that they can afford to be fat. Calories are now cheap. Never have people spent so small a proportion of their income on food and they are still ballooning up.

People also like to indulge the fantasy that their size isn’t their fault. It’s glands, it’s a compensation for being miserable, it’s the pernicious advertising. It would be interesting to see how these excuses would stack up in a world where Coke cost £4 a litre (like beer).

There have been mutterings about a “Fat Tax” but if you call it that, it won’t ever happen. Fat people have a tough time as it is, they say (all 20 million of them) without taxing them into the bargain. So call it the Health Service Levy. But for God’s sake stop wringing your blubbery mitts and actually do something.

I leave you with Ricky Gervais saying what needs to be said.

  

Making schnapps - a step towards peasantdom

I’m turning into a peasant.

I’ve always thought that this was a much funnier, if less likely, translation of “je deviens paysan” than “I’m becoming a farmer”. You always get taught in school that a farmer is “un fermier” in French. Well it may be, but no one around here says it much. It’s always “paysan”. I’m not really becoming a farmer, but I have been doing a couple of peasantish things recently which are doing my peasant credentials no harm at all.

Firstly, I have been “doing a barrel” (“faire un tonneau”). Not meaning, as you might have thought, that I have been rolling down Swiss mountainsides, or testing out waterfalls, but rather that I have been making schnapps. There are a lot of fruit trees in Switzerland and they seem to produce more fruit than the Swiss are inclined to eat, so they have a habit of turning it into fruit schnapps. It is the biggest spirit segment in the country. The colourless schnapps comes in a huge variety of flavours, but your local café can be expected to stock many of the following: pommes, prunes, williamine, abricotine, kirsch, coings, framboise. Apple, plum, pear, apricot, cherry, quince and raspberry if you prefer. Visitors to Switzerland should be encouraged to try these. There are others.

I have got quite a few fruit trees too: cherry, marello cherry, apple, pear, plum, quince and there comes a time when you just can’t make any more fruit tarts. Up until now I have always frozen what I can, but the freezer is full, so egged on by the local butcher who lent me a barrel, I set out to fill it with cherries.

It’s a long and time-consuming business. I don’t know how many cherries you can get in a 60 litre barrel, but I know it’s thousands, because I idly counted a thousand of them when I was picking. It turns out that even if your cherry tree is festooned with cherries, only some are right for putting in the barrel at any one time. The others are either not ripe enough, or overripe or bad. In fact, not being a professional cherry picker, it took me days to fill the barrel – days of concerted effort. I suspect I was a bit anal about it, and only put in cherries that I would happily have put on a tart. I don’t think you have to attain this level of fruit quality to produce decent kirsch. What you don’t want though, are the stalks. This is just as well, as generally, it’s not that easy to keep the stalk attached to the cherry.

Once your barrel is full, you leave it a couple of days or so, then add a bag of sugar mixed in with a litre of water. This is to kick start the fermentation. You should cover the barrel with its plastic lid and put a heavy stone on it. As any fule no, the fermentation process breaks the sugars in the fruit down into alcohol and carbon dioxide and if you don’t let the carbon dioxide escape from the barrel, the latter will explode eventually – which will give you a lot to clean up, never mind about the wasted days fruit picking. On the other hand, you desperately want to avoid air getting in. The heavy stone will ensure that the carbon dioxide, under massive pressure, will lift the stone enough to seep out of the barrel, whereas the air, under atmospheric pressure, is not strong enough to lift the stone to get in. This also means that you aren’t allowed to happily remove the lid on occasion to see how it is all coming along and to admire the bubbling cherries, or show your barrel off to visitors. Naturally, I found out all this rather late. The peasants seem to keep it all a little secret and are very vague about exactly what you are meant to be doing.

After a couple of weeks, the fermentation process should have stopped and you can seal up the barrel and take it to the local distillery. Because making schnapps is so traditional throughout Switzerland, there is bound to be a small distillery not far away which makes its business from distilling the barrels of fermented fruit provided by the local farmers. Here the distiller will write your name in chalk on the barrel lid and promise to ring you in a few days when he has distilled your barrel. It sits about outside in a courtyard containing the fruit of all the other local farmers. You are well on your way to becoming a peasant.

Full peasant status is achieved when you go to pick up your schnapps, or in my case, my kirsch. This is because quite apart from paying the distiller for his work, you also have to pay a tax to Bern on the quantity of alcohol produced. But…. If the schnapps comes from your own fruit trees instead of just from fruit you have bought for the purpose, you pay a lower rate of tax. You are officially recognised as being a peasant.

The distiller fills in a couple of forms for you and you pay him and take away your flagons of booze. But you still aren’t really allowed to drink it. You are then told that your schnapps will in fact improve over the next few months, if left somewhere in contact with the air. The more interaction there is with the air, the better, as this will smooth it out. Hence, you don’t want to seal up the flagons but put some cloth over them and store in a place where there is the most temperature variation, preferably an attic. I don’t have an attic, so my flagons are sitting in the woodshed. Best I can do.

So what’s the verdict? Well, I have ended up with about 12 litres of two different sorts of kirsch at 43% alcohol, since once I had filled up a barrel of cherries, I then went and bought another barrel and filled it with marello cherries. I didn’t know anything about the stone, the air, or the length of time necessary for fermentation. I did know that if I sealed the barrel it would blow up, so at least avoided that mistake. Consequently, the cherries had actually been left in the barrel a little too long, but more importantly, air had got in. This all means that the finished product was lower in alcohol than it would have been and doesn’t taste as good as it should. I have got 5 litres of kirsch.

The griottes on the other hand, hadn’t really finished fermentation when I took them to the distillery, so they had been pretty much surrounded by carbon dioxide and not air, even if I did keep lifting off the lid to have a look. They have turned out better and I have 7 litres of this sort of kirsch. So now I’m just waiting for Christmas when I can drink some of the stuff, but what I am going to do with 12 litres of kirsch I have no idea. Makes a lot of plum puddings, or fondues and will get you very drunk. More presents, I suppose. At the end of the day you spend your life around here making jams and such like for the pleasure of giving them away to all and sundry.

I’ll tell you about my other peasantish behaviour tomorrow. This post has gone on quite long enough.

 

Homemade riot – a Delia Smith recipe

Ingredients:

You will need:

1 greed-is-good mantra. In this society, having stuff is by far the most important thing. The more you have, the more worth as a person you have. If you don’t have anything, you don’t count. The media, obsessed with wealth, fame, celebrity, champagne lifestyles and rich lists, will reinforce the mantra. Your mantra should also have rampant consumerism attached. Make sure your butcher leaves it on – makes for a tastier recipe.

1 cotton-wool society. In the cotton-wool society, everyone is a victim and no one is a perpetrator. Nothing is your fault; you are a victim of your circumstances. You must never be punished or fear anything. There is no authority you ever need to be afraid of. Your parents can’t clip you around the ear, nor can school ever make you unhappy by punishing your poor behaviour. If you are ever taken to court, you shall suffer a ticking off or some “community service”. All shall have prizes. You mustn’t ever fail at anything; that might be upsetting for you. You will wear fluorescent vests and hard hats on any occasion which might present even the smallest risk. You know your rights. You haven’t a clue about your duties. Do you actually have any?

1 disenfranchised underclass. Make sure that a large segment of your society is unemployed or otherwise has no prospect of achieving any material status through legal means. No material status means no status at all. Try to increase the gap between poor and rich as far as you are able, but make sure that the conspicuous consumption of the rich is never far from the eyes of the poor.

1 government of morally suspect politicians. Ideally, they should fiddle their expenses, cosy up to the media for political ends, and be out of touch with the poorer elements of society with whom they have never really had to mix. They should be professional politicians, well versed in the complexities of Whitehall, but with no clue about lives without money. They should also never fear that it could ever happen to them.

1 feral youth. You should be able to find one of these in a culture of failed marriages, one-parent families and a total lack of discipline from the earliest age. The marriages fail under the pressure of constant work and worry to make ends meet, and the perception that a better marriage can be had in the nearest department store sale.

1 multicultural society. This is a spice mix in which all the different flavours should be distinctly present. It will add heat to the overall dish. The origins of the spices should be evident – you don’t want some sort of British homogenised interpretation of the real thing. With luck, no one should really know where they belong or who they are.

1 directionless police force. Maligned, discredited, headless, understaffed, stuffed with paperwork and demoralised as criminals are let free in society where all the prisons are full. Not that the prisons seem to do anyone much any good anyway.

1 economic crisis in which the news is all bad and the future looks to be worse than the present.

Method:

Mix all your ingredients in a bowl consisting of an alien urban environment of poor housing, drab high streets, pot-holed roads, heavy traffic and creaking public transport. There should be few social amenities, and those that exist should be fairly second rate. Ensure this by spending billions of £££ on high profile white elephants like the Olympics.

There is no need to cook anything. The mixture is exothermic in nature and should spontaneously combust if your ingredients are fresh enough.

Stand back and enjoy.

Next week, we will make bread and butter pudding.

 

It’s time for dandelion salad

 
 

 

And not, as Sean Connery keeps trying to tell me, for “green banking” – whatever that is. No doubt Crédit Agricole’s advertising agency think they know. Not a good name that, Connery, in French. Pronounced the same as “connerie”- “a stupid thing” or “ridiculous mistake”. Still, we’re getting off the point here.

 

One of the joys of spring is the dandelion salad. It’s a dish that is traditional here in Switzerland, or at least in this part, and has many advantages. These include the fact that is it delicious, costs almost nothing, is easy to make, and you have no chance to get bored of it as you can only make it for about a month and then it is over for another year.

 

There is, as far as I know, nothing special about Swiss dandelions, so you can make it just as well anywhere that you can find a dandelion. Those who think that dandelions should only be given to rabbits are missing out big time. This is what you do (as Raymondo used to say on the Jimmy Young show).

 

 Find a piece of ground relatively free from dog shit and containing dandelions. You will need a knife of some description and a paper bag (plastic bags are not so good for this). The dandelions must not be flowering; if they are, they will be bitter and it is too late, which is why you have to be making this dish now. Cut your dandelions out of the ground with the knife and put them in the bag. Don’t worry about getting the root and attendant earth – you’ll chop that off later and remove it. You will also end up with a considerable amount of grass and weeds, so any that you can avoid putting in the bag is all work that you won’t have to do later.

 

When you have a goodly amount of dandelions in the bag – enough for a lot of salad (this is a main dish, so get plenty – they don’t cost anything), you are allowed back inside to wash them. This is the boring bit. Run a big sink of cold water, sploosh the dandelions in it and then wash them, removing all the roots, grass, weeds and earth. You may have to rinse them about three times. It takes a bit of time, but you don’t get owt for nowt as they say. Dandelions may be free (unless you buy them at vast expense from the market where someone has already gone to the trouble of cleaning them, which is presumably what you are paying for), but they do require some effort. The best thing to do is to put on a CD and mindlessly carry out the washing and sorting task with a zen-like attitude.

 

Put your washed dandelion leaves in a salad spinner. Boil up some eggs for the hardboiled eggs – very Easterish this. Then you need to fry some lardons. The Swiss (like the French) have no real concept of bacon rashers. They tend to sell bacon in a rectangular chunk from which it is easy to cut lardons. But I can’t see that bits of fried bacon rasher would be any worse. How much do you need? Hard to say. Enough bacon and hard-boiled eggs to make the salad interesting, as pure dandelion leaves would be a bit dull. 

 

 You’re almost done. Make a vinaigrette in a big salad bowl, add a huge quantity of dandelion leaves, throw in the quartered hard-boiled eggs and the bits of bacon (which needn’t be hot), toss everything and eat it. You should find that this is so appetising that within a few days you go out looking for more dandelions. If you have picked too many for one salad (very industrious and wise of you), you can wrap the extra up in newspaper to keep them moist and put them in the fridge for consumption in the next few days. If you don’t get around to it and have to sling them, it’s not the end of the world. Plenty more where they came from, but it’s a bit of a bore chucking out dandelions that you have gone to all the trouble of washing and sorting.

 

 

Consisting principally of leaves, I can’t help feeling that this recipe is pretty healthy. In the spirit of this blog, I can’t be bothered to start trawling the net to find out which particular vitamins and goodies dandelion leaves are supposed to contain; I’ll leave that up to you. And I suppose that if you are vegetarian, you could find something else to put in the salad with them. But the hard-boiled egg and bacon recipe is the classic standard.

 

Remember to make this almost immediately. You haven’t got long. In a few weeks, depending on the weather, it will all be too late and you’ll have missed the opportunity for tasty free food, requiring no gardening on your part or even a long walk to get, for another year. Let me know how you get on.

 

Bon appétit et joyeuses Pâques.