Scottish Sausage Stovie and food inequality

 

To 'Stove' means to stew in 'Scots', a one pot stew of meat and tatties cooked or braised slowly, and turns cheap ingredients; left over meat, sausages, tatties, carrots, swede, onions etc, into a filling and tasty meal. All you need is a skill set to put great inexpensive food on a table*. And I'm sure such 'how to' advice was once available in abundance frae the Scottish auld yins, but I fear for some who face power poverty will prefer pecuniary problems than forsake Domino's delivery. 

The thing is they're on their way tae that. And we can't fix them. 

Years ago I lived in Morecambe's West End, the 'Alexander Ward', then flat and bedsit land, with the highest unemployment rate anywhere in Europe. Steak was cheap in the butchers on Yorkshire Street and burgers were expensive I always thought as I bought various cuts of meat, like neck of lamb. One day I was at a butchers at Princess Crescent in Bare, Morecambe and noticed how cheap the burgers were and how that the rump steak appeared expensive compared to what I'd recently looked at. I asked the butcher, who said that in the West End people couldn't afford steak but would buy burgers and it was the opposite away around at the other end. The posher end, of town.

You see with food going up in price I'd been thinking that education was the way of helping people with the difficulties of putting top scran on the tray. But the more I considered food economics the worse it got, you see for some of us we have advantages:-

• Supermarkets deliver
• Ethnic food is bought in larger quantities as these shops are distant
• We buy locally as we need but our larder is stocked 
• Waste is little, but we waste
• Transport provides choice
• We have the ability to cook

So you see food poverty is really food inequality - These are the basic benchmark -

• use of your own cooker, power, pans and utensils
• to be able to go to buy the food you want at a price you want to pay where you want to shop
• to be able to buy enough food for more than just today, and have somewhere to store it
• having a cooking skill set
• can plan meals though the week

If the answer is No to any of the above, then there is Food inequality. 

And worse and what I fear:-

• prioritising available money on other things rather than food, like putting the light on.

There is no fix for today.

You can only fix the future. Teach all children in schools to cook basic meals, and Stovies would be a good place to start.

*Most of my recipes are simple, tasty and cheap. Everyone reading this can make a scrummy sausage casserole and feed a family on a few quid.