Interesting Facts

People in the UK are eating 3.5 million ready meals - wait for it - a day. (According to analysts Kantar Worldpanel for trade mag The Grocer, Brits munched their way through £3.2 billion worth of chilled or frozen dinners in 2015. Family favourites are shepherd's pie, lasagne and chicken tikka masala, with traditional British meals accounting for £1.3 billion of sales. Italian meals £610 million, Indian nearly £400 million and Chinese meals £281 million. We are turning into a nation of microwave chefs.)

According to an article from the Sun newspaper, Police canteens in the UK serve mostly junk food and it's all subsidised by the tax payer. (In Humberside, a fry-up is £3.80 for “ten items, including bacon, sausage, eggs, beans and crumpets." Lunch choices in Cumbria include scampi and chips, burger and chips and deep-fried spicy battered chicken, all for £3.20, which wouldn't buy you a sandwich in a normal cafe. In Herts a pizza costs £2.35, and Manchester sells pies for £1.12. I think I'll have the chicken piri piri and rice from the Met. I visited the website to see if I could find the price, and it told me it uses cookies (I bet it does.))

According to a report by by Caroline Saunders, Andrew Barber and Greg Taylor, lamb produced in New Zealand and shipped to Britain has a smaller carbon footprint than lamb produced locally in the UK. (To be exact, farmers in Britain use four times as much carbon per tonne of New Zealand lamb than farmers in New Zealander. How can shipping meat half way round the world create fewer "food miles" than locally rearing it? Well when you want to understand the real cost to the environment it's not enough to calculate "food miles" you have to look at other factors, and when it comes to raising lamb the UK uses more nitrogen fertiliser for pasture land by a factor of more than 13. I'm not sure who financed the study, for all I know it was the NZ meat marketing board, but maybe they have a point.) Information source

According to AC Nielsen, a marketing research firm, the British pie market is worth £229 million a year. (The traditional steak, and steak and kidney pies are still Britain's favourites, but you can also buy more sophisticated varieties; including Aberdeen Angus minced steak with stilton, chicken and Wiltshire ham, and even lamb and mint pies. References to 'pyes' as a food have been noted in English and Latin literature from as early as the 12th century and the full description of a pie as we would know it appears in books of the 14th century.) You can read more about British food here. Source

Today is the start of British Pie Week. More on British Traditions, Food and Culture here.

Long Clawson Dairy in Leicestershire is going to make a limited edition run of Stilton this Christmas, which will  cost about £60 for a cracker sized slice. (It will work out at  At £60.87 per 100g slice, or £608 a kilo.   Why is it so expensive?  Well it's made with real gold.   Will anyone be dumb enough to buy it?  Of course they will.  The dairy  has already been contacted by a variety of interested parties including an oil sheikh and a famous pop star.  Suffice to say, hubby will have to content himself with the usual mouldy variety. )

The first curry restaurant in the UK opened in 1809. (Yes, over 200 years ago, an Indian migrant, Dean Mahomed, opened Britain's first curry house to cater to the fashion for spicy food. The restaurant was called the Hindostanee Coffee House, and customers could smoke hookah pipes and recline on bamboo-cane sofas as they tucked into spicy meat and vegetable dishes. Nowadays they are more likely to be swigging pints of lager, and falling off their chairs.) Source: BBC News

The pineapple wasn't known in Europe until 1493, when Christopher Columbus landed on the Caribbean island of Guadaloupe and  the sailors ate, enjoyed and recorded the curious new fruit. (But the pineapple wasn't cultivated successfully in European hothouses, and pineapple pits, until around 1720. It became associated with great wealth, and you can see the pineapple motif on many historic buildings and in art and carvings etc.  It was so highly regarded that King Charles posed with his gardener John Rose, as he presented King Charles with the first pineapple grown in England.)

Haggis from Scotland has been banned in the USA for 40 years. (It was banned because the US Food Standards Agency prohibits sheep lung in food products.   You see!  Sometimes America gets it right!)

According to the Government's Food Standards Agency, your average Brit eats around 8.6g of salt per day. (This amount is down from the 9.5g per day we noshed in 1990, but the recommended allowance for adults is 6g per day and for children just 2g. No wonder us Brits are so cheerful (see previous post))

During Christmas 2008 the UK consumed around 10 million turkeys. (From free-range fresh, to frozen, it's still the bird of choice.)

The famous Anglo Indian fusion dish, Coronation Chicken, was invented by Constance Spry and served at the Queen's Coronation lunch in 1953. (Nowadays if you were to serve it, you'd be considered slightly old-fashioned.)

Fray Bentos is actually the name of a town in Uruguay. (Fray Bentos is better known in the UK as a brand of corned beef. And the original location of the main factory that produced Fray Bentos tinned meat for the German-British Liebig Extract of Meat Company (what a name) was in Fray Bentos, Uruguay. Thirty years after the closure of the plant, the Brazilian-owned Marfrig Group is producing corned beef in Fray Bentos once again and exporting it to Britain. Yet again, I'm not sure if this should be interesting places or interesting food.)

A study by the Food Standards Agency has found that in the UK a quarter of takeaway curries contain illegal levels of potentially harmful chemicals. (The law currently allows curry sauces to contain up to 500mg/kg of artificial colour but one sample was found to contain five times this level. Basically a cocktail of tartrazine (E102), sunset yellow (E110), ponceau 4R (E124), carmoisine (E122) and allura red (E129). And yet if you served up a brown or light yellow curry, customers would probably complain.)

There are more than 10,000 species of mushroom found in Britain. (However, more than 20 types fungi that grow here are toxic. They have names like, the death cap, fly agaric, deadly webcap and destroying angel. So, if you go mushroom picking this autumn, make sure you know what you're doing.)

According to the Times the great British cup of tea is making a comeback. (Tearooms around the UK and especially in London are enjoying a resurgence as people discover that sharing a pot of tea is cheaper than a round of cappuccinos.)

powered by ODEO According to the NHS the average person in the UK eats less than 3 portions of fruit and vegetables a day, instead of the recommended 5. (That's because they are counting their chips as a portion.)

According to a survey for the Health Food Manufacturers' Association, two-thirds of Britons mistakenly think that eating chips, roasties and mashed potato contributes to their five-a-day recommendation. (The 5-a-day campaign aims to highlight the healthier benefits of eating more fruit and vegetables. The idea being that you should eat 5 portions of fruit and veg a day. Of course the kind of fruit and veg you eat does matter, and I don't think a packet of crisps counts.)

Brits eat more fast food than Americans. (That's typical isn't it? They invent the darn stuff and we swallow it.)

According to a poll for British Food Fortnight, an annual event designed to excite and educate young people about British food, of 1,000 children in England aged between eight and 13, 54% did not know pasties came from Cornwall and 57% did not know haggis originated in Scotland. (Of course the confusion may arise because they'd probably never even tasted haggis and that Devon and Cornwall keep arguing about who invented the pasty.)