The Singer, the Cook, his Kebabs and a Box of Ready Made Masala.

If you've ever seen Qawwali singers in action you can easily imagine them working up a serious appetite. A Qawwali 'Party' comprises of a main singer and his 'support - other male singers who provide a clapping accompaniment. The performance is charged with energy and the whole effect is mesmeric. Once 'in the zone' they can sing their devotional songs of praise for hours and
Nusrat Fateh ali Khan remains the most famous exponent of recent times.

Nusrat was a man with a large appetite for devotion... and food.  After his concerts, particularly at the Hackney Empire in London, the eatery of choice for Nusrat was the Lahore One Kebab House (218 Commercial Road). The owner Mohammed Anjum is, in his own way, a patron of the arts and was always delighted to host Nusrat and his band of singers. I've visited several times and am happy to see his restaurant is well reviewed. If you ever go, try the kheer;  I've never really been a huge fan of rice pudding but theirs is truly delicious - incredibly thick and creamy.

Of course in this part of London it's all about the kebabs. Mohammed's is one of several Pakistani restaurants in the area - the most well known being  the Lahore Kebab House on Umberston Street. 

This restaurant has undergone a transformation since my first visit and is now a spacious, glistening, stone clad version of its former self. It's easy to bemoan the loss of 'character' in a place but it is a far cry from the cramped, dingy original restaurant.

I worked with head chef Mohammed Azeem on the Madhur Jaffrey series "Curry Nation" and if you ever wondered how it is that restaurants are always able to create the same taste then here's the very simple answer - they use packets of ready mixed spices - from memory it was  'Shan' spices.

This was a real surprise to me given that I thought they'd have closely guarded recipes for their spice mixes. What has happened is a revolution in spicing which has really gone by unnoticed. Vacuum packing mean that restaurants in the UK, and for anywhere else on the globe for that matter, can buy freshly ground  spice mixtures. Gone are the days of tubs of 'Curry Powder' or  generic 'Madras' . Nowadays you can get spice mixtures for all sorts of styles and even specific ingredients. Restaurants love them as they get a good, consistent tasting product that also saves time and you too can use them and get that same 'curry house' taste.  The downside is blandness - in the sense of uniformity (you'd  never describe Mohammed's food as tasting bland!).

I watched him cook a 'Nihari', (curried lamb shanks) a real favourite amongst Pakistanis. To make the sauce he used Shan's Nihari mixture combined with a few extra spices  - chilli, cumin, coriander etc. 

For the Nihari recipe we were writing for the 'Curry Nation' book we couldn't exactly say,  "now add a box of Nihari spice mix".  Hardly Madhur Jaffrey. So I drew on the list of ingredients on the box and one of Madhur's own nihari recipes to devise something that was not an exact copy and could be made from relatively common spices - without 'long pepper' for example. I think what we created for the book has an excellent flavour and is true to the nihari 'style'. It does beg the question what is 'authentic'?, apart from an experience sought after by Indian food aficianados. 
 Of course the answer to that is - no one really knows.

The TESCO tonnes - can their food waste be a good thing?

TESCO's 'confessions of a supermarket' has quite rightly generated a great deal of fury amongst consumers. Aside from the staggering amounts of waste associated with shopping at their outlets, its also not just them. Is it less annoying that Waitrose and M+S create huge amounts of food waste? No. Will they be publishing their dirty secrets as well? Let's hope so. I couldn't find any real data. M+S do say however that produce that doesn't make the grade for their stores goes to 'Company Shops' or is redistributed to charities.

What I find annoying about TESCO's data is its presentation. According to the food waste hotspots it focused on - Bananas, Grapes, Bagged Salads, Apples and Bakery, its retail waste is barely 1%  - a bit more for Bakery. You can see the retail figure next to their logo, dwarfed by the waste figures related to agriculture, processing and us the consumer. It's as if they've dissociated themselves from any responsibility. No one's fooled. Confusion over use by/sell by dates, BOGOF's, the demand for fruit and veg perfection ... all of these things collude to whittle away what's grown and what's actually eaten.
TESCO helped fund the Sustainable Consumption Institute at Manchester University - set up in 2007, so it makes you wonder why they've been so slow to change their practices.

Of course we can't leave the consumer out of the waste chain. There won't be many saintly types who only buy and eat what they need. The person in this BBC clip is probably representative of many and succumbs to the western disease of over consumption.  Food is slung through fear that it is off, the carrots have gone rubbery or the cheese faintly flushed with mould.

According to recent UN report on food waste, one third of the food produced on the planet for us humans is wasted - about 1.3 billions of tonnes. It also says wealthy countries waste more food after consumers purchase it. It's the other way round for poorer countries where more food is wasted in storage and handling.
The numbers are mind boggling. Put another way we could give 1 tonne of food to 1.3 billion very hungry people. Or half a tonne to 2.6 billion people, a quarter of a tonne to 5.2 billion people - whatever,  you get the gist. We could feed most of the current population of the world just on our waste food. Bonkers.

Back in 2004/ 2005 I worked for DEFRA on their 'Shopping Trolley Report' looking at the environmental impacts of commonly purchased food items. For a few years after there were a lot of buzz words about 'carbon footprints', 'food chains' and 'life cycle assessment', 'field to fork' etc. Then in 2007 the financial markets went belly up and since then minds have tended to focus on job security and cuts of various kinds.

Now that they've released these figures, TESCO and the other supermarkets will be forced to act. Food waste and sustainability is back in the headlines and supermarkets, with all the power they wield over production, hate those kind of headlines. What's more,  after bankers/MPs expenses etc, the general public has never been less forgiving. Supermarkets have to rethink how they impose their will along the food chain.
These are still tough times for millions of householders, now facing huge energy price hikes. But food waste can become a totem for effective change and that has to be a good thing.