Sometimes I have to do research for this blog.
I know this does not appear immediately obvious. I know that it reads as if a whole load of guesswork, social myths, generalisations and brackets are all boiled in a witches’ cauldron and then ladled onto the blog in big gristly lumps.
But I do like to check some things before I write them, and this research can lead me to strange places.For example, it was my determination to get the line from the Postman Pat theme exactly right (damn, song stuck in head again) that led me to discover that it was written by Rick Wakeman.
And for the recent post about having one hour to live I needed to list three aphrodisiac foods, so had to google in order to be able to add saffron to the only two that I could think of, oysters and crushed rhino horn (the admission that I have never tasted any of these three items tells you more than I probably meant to tell you about my love life).
But there were other foods on the list – some strange and some everyday. And in case you’ve a birthday (or other day when you might get lucky) coming up I feel duty bound to list some of these for you.
They have mead on the list. I’m not counting that, because it’s drink. They might as well have listed lager, or vodka and red bull (I bet the phrase ’mead goggles’ was in common use in olden times).
They list Cow Cod Soup, not a dish which has ever appeared on any menu which has ever been put in front of me. They list arugula, balut, borojo and yohimbine, (not one of which are recognised by Spellcheck) which I suspect are just chemical elements that got into the wrong list.
They list deer’s penis and antlers. In other words you’ve to go down to the woods today, shoot Bambi‘s dad rather than his mum, cut off his, well, most of him, then eat it (how, by the way? Chopped? Puréed? In a kebab?) .
Seriously, that’s a lot of work. Just go and buy some mead.
Anyway, that stuff is for the flashy diners, those who eat at restaurants where the cutlery lines up either side of your plate like soldiers on parade. There are other more commonplace foods listed.
Garlic is one of them. The problem, of course, is that after garlic you may well be randy but you will also be alone, and a situation like that can only reach one possible climax.
But there are bananas, avocado, asparagus, figs, tomatoes, lettuce, strawberries.
We hear constantly about the importance of our five a day. Our Department of Health encourages this by producing images of the famous “food pyramid”, as shown here.
Have a look at the items they want us to eat six of, by the way. What are they? The second thing is obviously bread (both brown and the supposed worthless white), the third might be rice crispies, but the others appear to be a baseball, a dog-turd, a shaved hedgehog and a microscope full of bacteria (I think the technical term for all of this is a batterburger) .
Then they have this sentence on their Food Board website:
Eat at least four servings of fruit and vegetables a day to ensure you get all the vitamins you need.
Ignore the fact that the Food Board seem to be offering a 20% discount on the amount of fruit and veg we need (perhaps because of the recession). The slogan isn’t exactly thrilling, is it? Given the information I’m offering them above, I hope they can come up with a better campaign.
They could sex it up, in fact.
Worth Doing Badly 
Cow Cod Soup? I think you are codding me!
Is cow cod soup, a meat-fish puree?
*vomits quietly in the nearest pot plant*
Seriously, girls, Cow Cod Soup. Perhaps the original Surf N Turf.
I think your treatment of it would probably be safest, LK.