I got bored tonight and started digging around on Vox. The Culture section is a great read, especially the Food and Drink section. It's like all the people who can write coherent posts are sitting in one place, writing about things I like! Unfortunately I found out what Delia Smith (an old-school UK TV chef) is up to these days, which is never a great thing. She may have given me some great tips on cooking eggs once upon a time, but what I read made me angry enough to write this post.

This may be a very touchy subject if you are:

• a vegan or vegetarian
• way more extreme about your animal welfare views than me (I'm at Animal Welfare League level, not PETA2 level)
• the type that feels ill when they remember that meat = animals (I have met people like this)
• the type that rolls their eyes whenever I start harping on about food again

In which case you may want to skip past the cut to the nice vegeterian foodporn. :D (Or not, if you're the fourth type.)

Sooo, Delia's got a series on the BBC called Delia Uncovered. Accompanying it is a cookbook, Delia's How to Cheat at Cooking, which promises to be one of the best-selling cookbooks ever published.

The reason this is a sad event for cooking shows is mostly in the ingredient lists. I'm all for quick meals on weeknights and I think frozen and canned vegetables can be a godsend, but cringe with me, guys. Mince in a can. Frozen mashed potatoes.

MINCE IN A CAAAAN

The recipes remind me of the recipes you find in Super Food Ideas (the very bottom of FPC's otherwise awesome cooking magazine hierarchy). Some of that stuff is... I wouldn't put it in my mouth. In a lot of cases it isn't that cheap, either. She uses canned quail eggs, roasted peppers, crab meat and lobster meat. Shit dude, I buy that stuff when I'm feeling rich!

The corner-cutting is wasteful at best. Really, is it that hard to defrost your frozen budget mince compared to taking it out of a... can?! I can only assume that some of these recipes also contain Delia's hallmark slatherings of butter, butter, cream, eggs and butter (the main reason I don't like her).

The other issue is that in opposition to the newer "food trendies" like Jamie Oliver, she has attacked organic food and supported the battery hen industry as a way to feed poorer families. The article's pretty sensational, but Delia seems to be an extremely influential person so anything she is vaguely perceived to support will have serious effects either way.

She says she's not getting involved in food politics, but celebrity chefs are the very reason we end up with jars of red and yellow roasted peppers in supermarkets. I have read enough bragging about this topic in food-related books to last a lifetime. What's wrong with using their influence for something a little more noble?

I think something's being lost here, though. There are two kinds of chicken breed used in agriculture: those that are for laying eggs and those that are for eating. "Battery chickens" refers exclusively to layers, as far as I'm aware. Regardless of the production method, egg-laying chickens tend to have a lighter build but produce bigger eggs, while meat chickens are the ones that bulk up well (even before they get pumped full o' protein and hormones) but aren't expected to yield eggs. Now with the way battery hens are born, live and die, I really doubt you'd have much edible meat left by the time they were done laying eggs. That meat usually gets processed into stock cubes or soup and I wouldn't expect it to be too "nutritious", as Delia claims it is.

The only conclusion I can draw from all this is that she doesn't know battery hens are used to produce eggs and dropped the phrase into a conversation about organic chicken meat, which is another battle altogether.

I certainly don't expect most people to know this stuff, but I fucking well expect an ancient TV chef who devoted an entire episode to EGGS to know something about how said eggs arrived at the table. Her comments could set back the advances that have been made with egg production - I can buy a pretty cheap half dozen of barn-laid or free range eggs these days - which many of us are hoping will eventually flow on into chicken meat production. Maybe I'm wrong and the UK uses battery hens to refer to all sorts of chickens, but Google seems to confirm my theory. But maybe this is just the beginning of The Delia Effect!

The Vox posts that started me off...

About the show: Delia is back....oh dear
About the book: 'Delia's How to Cheat at Cooking' Champions Laziness. Could the 'Delia Effect' be Damaging?
About the chickens: Two steps forward, One step back.

My point remains that YARGH MINCE IN A CAN.

Sigh. Anyway, it's perfectly possible for recipes to exist which contain cheap and readily available (even fresh!) ingredients, don't take long to make, are healthy and are delicious to boot! As proven by tonight's dinner. And I'll probably grab a copy of Nigella Express eventually - girl always knows what she's doing.