Where's my forest gone? To the Grouse...that's where....

[wynne]

All this talk of minimum wage, I do actually have to do some work now.

 

[bikeworkshop]

You spent £20, minimum wage is £12.21. Half hour is £6.10 rounding down. It's amazing your books balance

I've done quite a lot of accounts Bob

The meal was £5 each, that's half an hour at the minimum wage.

the minimum wage is £12.21
https://www.gov.uk/national-minimum-wage-rates

In 40h full time work, £25,400 per annum
take home works out at £21,800
That's £10.48/hr

Let's include workplace pension, (which would be 5% of £18000 employees contribution)

Works out another 43pence an hour

Leaves £10.05.

So half an hour is £5.02
(And a hapenny obvs)

I would run these figures past our accountant but he charges considerably more per hour than I earn

 

[Guinessisgoodforyou]

I've done quite a lot of accounts Bob

the minimum wage is £12.21
https://www.gov.uk/national-minimum-wage-rates

In 40h full time work, £25,400 per annum
take home works out at £21,800
That's £10.48/hr

Let's include workplace pension, (which would be 5% of £18000 employees contribution)

Works out another 43pence an hour

Leaves £10.05.

So half an hour is £5.02
(And a hapenny obvs)

I would run these figures past our accountant but he charges considerably more per hour than I earn

Tom you're obviously well off, £20 for one meal at home is extortionate. Someone on minimum wage will not be spending that on one meal.
The way I read it was half an hour for the meal, not half an hour each. That's even worse.

 

[bikeworkshop]

Tom you're obviously well off, £20 for one meal at home is extortionate. Someone on minimum wage will not be spending that on one meal.
The way I read it was half an hour for the meal, not half an hour each. That's even worse.

Seems I spend most of my money on food.

Food used to cost 1/3 of household income- i think ours still does.

National average is under 10%

https://ahdb.org.uk/news/consumer-i...nding-on-food-since-the-cost-of-living-crisis

Being old can have the benefit that housing cost is low.*

My younger colleagues must spend over a third of their income on Bristol housing

*but having dependent adult children more than offsets this

 

[bagpuss]

Cheaper option that. Curious to know if autocannibalism is technically vegan.

At least I know what I am eating, i suppose .

 

[Cloverleaf]

I was going to reply to the badger point but the thread seems to have taken a turn!

As with the individual approach to making peace with our impact on the planet, we all spend money on different things. If you value good, tasty, home cooked food then you'll be happy spending more on it than someone who is happy buying ready meals and wants to always have the latest iphone. That's not to judge but simply a statement of fact. Raw ingredients are cheap relative to the cost of ready meals. Granted, I have a bunch of steaks in the freezer that are at least £10 each, but they're from a farm on the Black Isle, aged, and 400g each. Quite good value IMO, but if you're trying to feed a family of four on minimum wage then clearly not an option. In contrast I have no family to worry about feeding and so regularly buy £50 bottles of whisky, and my average evening meal will be somewhere in the region of £5-10. I just spent £40 on fish which'll last me a week as my GF's staying so it's for two. There was another £20 in there for the dog. I've also been on ski club trips where we cook food en masse and I've made a tasty curry for ten people for less than a tenner. It just takes a little more time, both for hunting for ingredients and preparation.

I think like early '00's bike prices we all got used to food being cheap. Like dirt cheap. Happy meals for a quid, a can of coke being 50p etc. Explosive inflation (driven majorly by corporate greed) has changed that, but the core is that proper food is still going to be cheaper per nutrient than a ready meal. Maybe not per calorie, but then that's a terrible benchmark unless you're actually starving. The reality is that our parents and grandparents spent a huge amount of their income on food, spent less on frivolous crap, and the food they did buy was much closer to being real. Sure, there was tinned stuff, but the bulk of their diet came from real stuff that was still identifiable as what was either living on the farm, or as it came out the soil. We're so far from that now for many people that people are completely unable to identify basic ingredients let alone actually know what to do with them. But if you take the animal welfare out of it you can buy 1kg of chicken thighs with the bone in from Tesco for less than £3. Cook them without the bones and you can make great stock for other things from the collection of bones that are left, and you get the goodness out of them, and if you throw them in something like cockaleekie soup with the bones still in then you'll get so much goodness out of them the soup'll be solid when it cools. What's the cost of that? Some bread (cheap if you buy, very cheap if you make it yourself), some chicken at £3, and a few leeks. A hearty, healthy meal for 8 servings for less than a fiver. Is that chicken going to be as good or as tasty as stuff that costs 3-4 times as much? Absolutely not. But it'll still be a shit load better than anything you get in a ready meal that's going to be stuffed with fillers. The problem is that families are now time poor as both parents work, probably commute a fair amount, and everyone feels like they're sinking. Plus they probably also aren't confident cooks because we're again so far removed from every family cooking proper food from proper ingredients.

I realise I am saying all this from a position of privilege, we all are to a greater or lesser degree, I can cook well and I can afford decent ingredients that allows me to be lazy and still have tasty food, but the reality is that raw ingredients are cheaper if not easier than processed crap. If you find basic food bland then spices are cheap; garam masala, curry powder, or other mixes like ras al hanout can all add flavour. Or even just the process of maximising flavours by reducing things down; roasting chicken before adding it to soup etc. Yes, expensive, fresh from the farm ingredients are expensive. But cheap cuts of meat, pulses and veg, the combination of which is all pretty healthy, is going to be cheap. Maybe not everyone has five quid to spend a night on food per person, but I don't think it's a particularly unreasonable amount unless there are many people and only one bread winner. A Tesco meal deal sandwich is at least £4 these days and is utterly crap for you. But it's also possible to create healthy, home cooked meals for a few quid a portion. What ready made, process options are ever going to match that?

 

[Cloverleaf]

So here In the good old uk we trying to reintroduce beavers. So we had better get planting trees other wise Telegraph poles are going to be in for a hard time.
My other name is Davy Crocket.

As to beavers.

Lots of contention on this one; and as with everything you've got many competing arguments, priorities and beliefs. Fishermen hate seeing their rivers dammed because they see anything other than smooth flow as a problem. Farmers hate seeing land flood and go marshy. People living downstream hate seeing their house underwater.

The more we concrete and tar over land the less surface area of earth there is to absorb increasingly heavy rain, leading to greater run off depletion of minerals from farm land, and increased flooding . However there's also the issue that councils have cut back on drain and gully cleaning, as well as ditch emptying (up here in the north of Scotland roads are getting destroyed because it's all run from Inverness or the central belt and nobody maintains the ditches pro-actively so water can't run off, sits in the dips, freezes and washes out the underside, creating more potholes. Anyway, that's micro flooding, not macro flooding.

Macro flooding happens downstream when huge amounts of water run off hillsides quickly, and all end up reaching either a bottleneck or a floodplain at the same time. Boscastle was an extreme example of the former but many areas also suffer from the latter. And of course we build on flood plains. But farmers upstream also want to maximise the useable areas of their fields so ditches are straightened and deepened, burns are widened and rivers cleaned and dredged. This helps drain the fields but leaves all the water rushing off and ending up in a town centre somewhere flooding out Oxfam.

So where do beavers come in to this? They create blockages in the rivers and burns, and actually cause flooding. Except it's localised and, by and large, upstream. Their work slows the water down by creating things called leaky dams. In the lakes they've introduced these things (the dams, not the beavers) and showed demonstrable reductions in downstream flooding as a result. Naysayers will complain that river runs are being ruined (they're not, they're just making it more difficult to fish them), and that they kill saplings by drowning them (because the saplings are the wrong type for the environment). Lots of species love this, and things like Alder want their feet in water, and also drink as much as a Scotsman at a rugby game, or me, but other introduced species tend not to. And of course it makes fields soft and unsuitable for growing crops. The reality is that most of the places which need the beavers are further upstream and the fields which typically flood are downstream. But it needs people to accept that land use and lanscapes will need to change. Not massively, but the issue we have is that land is overly managed and the best management comes from nature, in the main, not Susan in a council planning office who doesn't know what nature looks like, nor from developers wanting to build on flood plain land, nor the farmer wanting to maximise crop or livestock output on their land. Beavers also don't eat everything and will do less damage than a lot of other species will (or humans for that matter!). Basically, humans like to feel like they're in control of everything and want to direct, and improve. Except we're terrible as a species for appreciating the knock on impact of our choices. Beavers just do what they've done forever. They don't need to think it through, they just do what's natural for them. And by and large, it's a benefit to the landscape, and we should embrace that it's good for us too.

 

[bikeworkshop]

I was going to reply to the badger point but the thread seems to have taken a turn!

As with the individual approach to making peace with our impact on the planet, we all spend money on different things. If you value good, tasty, home cooked food then you'll be happy spending more on it than someone who is happy buying ready meals and wants to always have the latest iphone. That's not to judge but simply a statement of fact. Raw ingredients are cheap relative to the cost of ready meals. Granted, I have a bunch of steaks in the freezer that are at least £10 each, but they're from a farm on the Black Isle, aged, and 400g each. Quite good value IMO, but if you're trying to feed a family of four on minimum wage then clearly not an option. In contrast I have no family to worry about feeding and so regularly buy £50 bottles of whisky, and my average evening meal will be somewhere in the region of £5-10. I just spent £40 on fish which'll last me a week as my GF's staying so it's for two. There was another £20 in there for the dog. I've also been on ski club trips where we cook food en masse and I've made a tasty curry for ten people for less than a tenner. It just takes a little more time, both for hunting for ingredients and preparation.

I think like early '00's bike prices we all got used to food being cheap. Like dirt cheap. Happy meals for a quid, a can of coke being 50p etc. Explosive inflation (driven majorly by corporate greed) has changed that, but the core is that proper food is still going to be cheaper per nutrient than a ready meal. Maybe not per calorie, but then that's a terrible benchmark unless you're actually starving. The reality is that our parents and grandparents spent a huge amount of their income on food, spent less on frivolous crap, and the food they did buy was much closer to being real. Sure, there was tinned stuff, but the bulk of their diet came from real stuff that was still identifiable as what was either living on the farm, or as it came out the soil. We're so far from that now for many people that people are completely unable to identify basic ingredients let alone actually know what to do with them. But if you take the animal welfare out of it you can buy 1kg of chicken thighs with the bone in from Tesco for less than £3. Cook them without the bones and you can make great stock for other things from the collection of bones that are left, and you get the goodness out of them, and if you throw them in something like cockaleekie soup with the bones still in then you'll get so much goodness out of them the soup'll be solid when it cools. What's the cost of that? Some bread (cheap if you buy, very cheap if you make it yourself), some chicken at £3, and a few leeks. A hearty, healthy meal for 8 servings for less than a fiver. Is that chicken going to be as good or as tasty as stuff that costs 3-4 times as much? Absolutely not. But it'll still be a shit load better than anything you get in a ready meal that's going to be stuffed with fillers. The problem is that families are now time poor as both parents work, probably commute a fair amount, and everyone feels like they're sinking. Plus they probably also aren't confident cooks because we're again so far removed from every family cooking proper food from proper ingredients.

I realise I am saying all this from a position of privilege, we all are to a greater or lesser degree, I can cook well and I can afford decent ingredients that allows me to be lazy and still have tasty food, but the reality is that raw ingredients are cheaper if not easier than processed crap. If you find basic food bland then spices are cheap; garam masala, curry powder, or other mixes like ras al hanout can all add flavour. Or even just the process of maximising flavours by reducing things down; roasting chicken before adding it to soup etc. Yes, expensive, fresh from the farm ingredients are expensive. But cheap cuts of meat, pulses and veg, the combination of which is all pretty healthy, is going to be cheap. Maybe not everyone has five quid to spend a night on food per person, but I don't think it's a particularly unreasonable amount unless there are many people and only one bread winner. A Tesco meal deal sandwich is at least £4 these days and is utterly crap for you. But it's also possible to create healthy, home cooked meals for a few quid a portion. What ready made, process options are ever going to match that?

My friends work in food import /distribution and they tell me environmental stress is raising most food commodity prices fast.

Corporate greed often then raises profit on a rising price
- I think the joke Musk blue plaque wasn't suggesting he had a duty to feed the poor, but that he could afford to do it.

His greedy pseudo-green companies gobble up power and fill earth orbit with junk, radio noise and useless space tourists, and our streets with virtue signaling massive cars