Hello and welcome to the jottings of a farmer in Suffolk who, despite his best efforts is still farming.
I have no real desire at my age to set pulses racing but I have a slight confession.
I do not go shopping. I never have much and I never will if I can get away with it.
The reason for this lack of domestic modernity in an otherwise model husband is I simply do not like shopping. However there are times when I have to go, such as my wife not feeling very well, so I donned the clean clothes and shoes, as I suspected that the shop would not wish for too many muddy footprints on their clean floor, and we set off for the local supermarket.
I would like to say at this point that we do not normally buy much in the way of foodstuffs at the supermarket, no vegetables, no potatoes and certainly no meat. It was with some surprise to me then that my wife picked up some minced meat which was for human consumption.
This supermarket-own brand of mince, she explained, was a cheaper source of meat for our cat than even the top quality tined cat food, and is healthier for the animal in her view. This got me to thinking of other foods for animal consumption that are more expensive to buy than the human equivalent.
So leaving her with the heavily-laden trolley I set off on my new mission of supermarket food pricing and can report that there seems no rhyme or reason to the price of food on the shelf. For example: dog mixer biscuits are just over three times the price of custard creams per kilo, although I would think that our old dog would have preferred the latter given a choice.
An Indian chicken tikka masala with pilau rice ready meal is twice as dear as a shepherd’s pie microwave dinner for two and cereal wheat breakfast biscuits are 73% cheaper than porridge oats. A good horse feed was only marginally cheaper than some jam filled biscuits and some plastic pack sausages were half the price of the tined dog food.
Bread worked out at £1.22 per kilo or £1,220.00 per tonne, which is considerably more than I get for my bread wheat by a factor of about ten. As for my wife’s assertion that tinned cat food was expensive, the own supermarket brand mince was £2.45 per kilo and the superbly packaged (so well packaged it is difficult to open unless using a blow torch) cat food was £2.48.
Many years ago my mother put some tinned salmon fish in my sandwiches when I still lived at home, it was after all a very long time ago, and she had purchased a most expensive brand as was her way. The following day putting my own lunch in I noticed on the half used tin a picture of a cat, and looking with a slighter keener eye, was perturbed to see the words, quite clearly, cat food.
Having eaten the sandwiches the day before it was rather difficult to do anything about it at that point but curse under my breath, but during the actual eating I had noticed no difference.
So to sum up, it pays to shop around when buying food, even the food for our pets, and even within the same store - and women are much better at this than men are. Oh and beware of tinned fish in your sandwiches.
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