Meal time

The day before yesterday the thoughts turned to lentils and so, against some sort of lentil stew on the morrow, retrieved half a tenderloin from the freezer. But come the morrow, the tide of mood had shifted against lentils and I opted for something both new-to-me and simpler. Cut the tenderloin into pieces, roughly a centimeter cubed and fry gently in half an ounce of butter. Add coarsely chopped onion (two) and orange pepper (one) and continue to fry gently. Add a dozen miniature tomatoes, quartered. (Note the absence of garlic, spices, herbs or e-numbers). Simmer for an hour, at the end of which one should have a stew of firm consistency. Not too much liquid oozing out of the bottom when a portion is placed on a plate. Serve with boiled white cabbage and boiled white rice. Excellent it was too, with the remainder micro-waved for a savoury supplement to breakfast this morning.

Over which I read of the impending doom of the pangolin, being eaten to extinction by gourmets in their native lands, particularly China. Which brought me back to the solution of the elephant problem noticed on 7th March. Why not farm the things? We manage to farm salmon, which in the wild have an exotic life style, so why not pangolins?

It may be that they need a hot climate, but pangolin farming in Africa would help to pay the Chinese for all the stuff they are installing there. It may also be that they need ants, but it should not be beyond the wit of man to either farm ants and supply them that way, or to make pellets out of something nutritionally equivalent, rather as we do for salmon. A good wheeze might be to harvest the periodic plagues of locusts. Dried locust pellets would then feed the pangolins from one plague to the next, thus, as it were, killing two birds with one stone.

An obvious punt for one of those entrepreneurial game shows.

A bit more depressing was the fate of care workers, mentioned in the context of the late Lady Thatcher. It seems that it is normal these days to only pay care workers for contact hours, contact hours shortly to be logged by smart phones, a 3rd millennium version of the clocking on machine, and not for travel time. Furthermore, their hourly rate is not that hot, if above minimum wage at all. Leading to the thought that if we, collectively, treat our care workers with this lack of respect, is it any surprise that some of them lack respect for us, their customers? And then, are there agencies out there which cater to the better off, agencies which treat both the workers and their customers with respect - for a price? Are we drifting back to the world where the rich do all right in such matters while the poor suffer? And while we might be prepared to do something for the deserving poor, to what extent are we going to help out the feckless & improvident in their declining years? Supposing they smoked?