Please submit your articles here

[Anthony Butcher]

We are looking for articles, recipes, book reviews and restaurant/pub/cafe reviews of 400+ words that are related to Label My Food.

Articles
The articles will provide a very useful tool in promoting the campaign. You can write about anything that you like, but a few suggested titles include:

Why I became vegetarian/vegan
My awful restaurant experience
A pub meal analysed
Food on this menu that I can't eat without asking for more information
My eating experiences as a Muslim/Hindu/Sikh/Buddhist/Jew
Why I think organic food is better
Animal Welfare is important but I would never become vegetarian
Trying to eat out in Kidderminster is traumatic

Recipes
If you would like to submit your favourite recipe, please do not just copy it out of a book; they must be your recipes, or variations on recipes.

Book Reviews
If you have any recipe or food related books, you could add a review here. If it is a book you would recommend, we will add a link to the book in the affiliate shop and it will help us raise some revenue as well.

Eatery Reviews
Next time you eat out, make some mental notes about the experience. Things to note are:

Speed and quality of service
Quality and presentation of the food
Information on the menu about the food
Atmosphere
How do staff respond to questions about the food
Value for money

If you want to be especially cheeky, see if you can take a photo of the menu on your phone, or take one away (if they are just paper menus) and scan it in. It will be interesting to look at the menu along with the review.

[Astrocat]

A pub meal analysed

It's been a while since i went into a pub, but I could do this if you give me a bit of help by telling me what sort of fare is dished up in pubs, nowadays....

From my brief time in pubs I'm thinking of stuff like fish & chips, yorkshire pudding, Ploughmans' salad, and so forth.
Other than that, er... I'm not sure - I know that they sometimes have peanuts and sandwiches..... ah ..... I could do some kind of analysis of those if you like though, from a minority consumerist perspective.

[Anthony Butcher]

Originally Posted by Astrocat

It's been a while since i went into a pub, but I could do this if you give me a bit of help by telling me what sort of fare is dished up in pubs, nowadays....

From my brief time in pubs I'm thinking of stuff like fish & chips, yorkshire pudding, Ploughmans' salad, and so forth.
Other than that, er... I'm not sure - I know that they sometimes have peanuts and sandwiches..... ah ..... I could do some kind of analysis of those if you like though, from a minority consumerist perspective.

Yup, pubs aren't great for vegans!

I went to a 'Thai' specialist food pub last night. Not a single vegetarian dish labelled on the menu, although I thought that there was at least one starter that could potentially have been.

[Astrocat]

Yup, pubs aren't great for vegans!

haha, yeahhhh .... they totally blow !


_________________________

A brief pub-grub analysis :

(1) fish & chips

The potatoes used for pub chips in the Uk are unlikely to be GM in origin, but those in America are much more likely to be.

The fish will typically be a large, factory-farmed variety, and the flesh is probably tainted with lead and mercury.



(2) yorkshire pudding
These are made with milk , eggs, and often with beef dripping.
The eggs and milk are almost always (if not always) going to be from animals in factories, who have probably been fed GM food, laden with pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and insecticides.
Antibiotic usage to regulate immune system in farmed animals has been illegal here in the UK for a while now, but is still rife internationally.....
There is no guarantee that anything bought in a UK pub is necessarily of UK origin, and it's unlikely that everything will be.


(3) Ploughmans' salad

This usually includes eggs and cheese, which will be produced in similar conditions to those described above.
The vegetables will not be organic unless the proprietor of the establishment is making a big show out of that being the case, although I've never seen that happen before... they may come drenched in chlorine, in the style of 'convenient snack packs' of salad, from supermarkets - because that saves the pub staff hassle in making the salad, since they come pre-washed and ready to use (and pre-washed means pre-chlorinated because of hygiene and regulation issues)


(4)
peanuts

The peanuts won't be organic.
If they're in on of those communal bowls, i remember reading in some twee womens' magazine that they've done studies on a selection of pub peanuts after one day in a pub, and found them to be contaminated with traces of all kinds of ghastly body fluids from all manner of sources :P blehhh..... kind of puts you off the idea of 'eating them in itself, i reckon.

sandwiches

Wheat is a crop which is notorious for soil erosion, truly the environment needs humans to grow a lot less wheat - so, the wheat used to make bread is only increasing the quantity of wheat which is being grown.

Other than that, it would depend on the contents.

[Anthony Butcher]

The real problem with sandwiches is the mayonnaise that now seems ubiquitous. Unless you buy them from one of the better supermarkets, the mayonnaise will almost certainly contain battery-farmed eggs.

[Astrocat]

yeah, pub sandwich fillings aren't hot.

I can think of :

Salad (in the style of the ploughmans' 'irradiated' salad)
Your mayonaisse example
Eggs (most likely battery eggs)
Cheese (most likely factory-dairy cheese, and made with either calf-rennet or (for lucky vegetarians) GM-enzymes as a replacement for the animal-derived rennet)
They're also likely to contain (factory farmed) butter, also.

[Alex McKee]

Some people don't even like mayonaisse and it is in nearly every type of sandwich sold in shops and pubs these days.

[Astrocat]

Barely-cooked (pasteurised) battery-farmed eggs.....
:P now there's a free ride in an ambulance, just waiting to happen.

[Alex McKee]

ROFL, so true!

[Astrocat]

Why I became vegetarian/vegan

I was vegetarian to begin with.

But, after somebody asked me "what's wrong with eating meat" a few years ago, i wrote this mini-essay :

Why eating meat is wrong

And this is my extensive topic about why I feel that it's logical and decent to be vegan rather than vegetarian or a flesh-eater