A Vegan told me about gelatin...

[Roger Hicks]

Ah, good point. Being horrified at quality is understandable (at the very idea is another matter...). I don't believe I've ever had English blood sausage, even though I did live in England for a year. I might just have to keep avoiding it after your description, though I usually like to try something once before writing it off. . . .

By all means try it. It's just that it's VERY dry and loaded with rusk/filler. A couple of slices with a 'full English breakfast' are OK, especially with egg yolk or tomato or something to lubricate their passage. Do listen to the BBC link, though: it's quite fascinating.

Going back to the gelatine, I have to say that I've almost never had decent French beef -- never hung long enough -- but we eat quite a lot of veal (in fact, it's veal sandwiches tonight). Some people, including my father, are horrified at the idea of veal, but it doesn't seem to occur to them that if you want milk, and butter, and cheese, and any other dairy products that vegetarians-but-not-vegans eat, calves are an inevitable by-product, and bull calves are not much use for milking. What we eat is not crated veal, though: more like young free-range bullock. I imagine their skin and bones are rendered for gelatine: calves'-foot jelly is after all proverbial.

Cheers,

R.

 

[KansanTim]

... Do listen to the BBC link, though: it's quite fascinating.

...

Some people, including my father, are horrified at the idea of veal, but it doesn't seem to occur to them that if you want milk, and butter, and cheese, and any other dairy products that vegetarians-but-not-vegans eat, calves are an inevitable by-product, and bull calves are not much use for milking. What we eat is not crated veal, though: more like young free-range bullock. I imagine their skin and bones are rendered for gelatine: calves'-foot jelly is after all proverbial.

Cheers,

R.

1st part: Just finished it. Fascinating is right!

2nd part: Completely agree about the inevitable by-product of dairy. It's an example, perhaps even one of the more obvious examples, of how elements of a food system are best not thought of as individual products, because many are inter-connected. Dairy products in society means more than milk and milk products, because meat from retired dairy cows and veal are essentially automatically produced in the process. On the gelatine rendering from the leftovers, it seems one of the likelier possibilities, at least to me. They will use them somehow, that's for certain.

Also agree about no crates for the veal. I have no ethical opposition to animal slaughter at all, but I do want it to have a good-quality life prior to its end.