Hear my roar – cook food from scratch

I’ve just been reading Wendyl Nissen’s NZ Herald newspaper column Opinion from a week or so ago, the one where she dissects the contents of a ready-made food product. I read these regularly because she dares go where others dare not: who in their right mind would actually want to taste-test some of the stuff she unearths. But this column got me going more than usual. The product in question was Big Ben Classic Cheese Sausage Roll.

Back in the day when sausage rolls were homemade, and well made, when housewives (Ha!) took pride in making the best batch in the street, these nuggets of tasty sausage meat wrapped in flaky pastry were hard to resist. Served hot with a big bowl of tomato sauce for dunking, they were a typical and much loved party scoffer, albeit a high-fat one. Wendyl reckons it takes no more that 8 ingredients to make them – 4 for the pastry and 4 for the meat filling. What a travesty that something so humble as a bit of meat wrapped in pastry should be turned into a monster requiring 44 ingredients to help glue it together, to colour it, to preserve it, to make it smell right, and to ensure it has enough salt so that the taste buds explode at first bite producing enough saliva to make the product seem moist and tasty in lieu of real, and good, ingredients. Good god. This is not food, not as our grandmothers knew it, and not as we should be consuming today. Hear my roar for more real food cooked from scratch. Throw out the ready-made, make it yourself, live longer, and healthier. Just COOK FOOD FROM SCRATCH!

Phew! that feels better …