A different whey

Because of the unfortunate accident with kitten Eddie yesterday, Angie had been in Memmingen and taken the chance to drop in to Aldi. We probably have further to drive to an Aldi than most Brits!

One of the things she brought back was this BRITISH Cheddar Cheese. Some readers will know of my year long, continuous, boring, never ending appeal for UK food manufacturers to start exporting British foods to Germany. Well it seems to have paid off - I trust I get the credit I deserve for this resilient work in the face of shouts of "hands off our British food, we're taking back control".

(Note added a few hours after posting: the organic British cheddar I had been buying cost  around 18.00/kg and people will pay this around here. It's the same price as some of the "better" local cheeses. I don't think I have been back there since Brexit but mainly due to the direct road there being closed for entire summer and still is,)

A miserable weather day and I agreed to match it.

Oh by the way, I researched the Cheddar - not too sure it's quite as British as the Union Jack suggests. It's indeed packaged in Oswestry by Arla Foods UK, a Danish-Swedish company that according to some info on one of the products they package for Tesco's, is made with milk imported from Denmark.

From what I can see on the web, the German packaging is as good as identical as the Aldi UK Mature Cheddar slice - £5.40/kg. The German version costs about £6.12/kg. Kerrygold Cheddar which is widely available here costs £8.61/kg.

The farming TV programme on Bavarian TV tonight, again showed that we are being misled by the incredible variety of milk brands and prices. 98% of the milk in Bavaria achieves the best quality rating, in the main comes from the same cows, held under the same less than ideal, conditions but is sold in packaging with various increasingly misleading pictures of cows grazing alpine meadows and meaningless "quality" symbols and claims. And the price which varies from 0.65 Euros/litre to 1.49 Euros/litre has nothing to do with the price the farmers get. Apparently the big brands do try within the course of a year, to end up paying just above the average. So if you want to pay more, then go for the tiny number of milk brands that sell milk that really has some "added value" e.g. organic, only grass fed, only from non de-horned herds etc.

We may well not be happy with global trading, well at least not when we need fresh roses in February or fresh grapes around the Christmas cheese board, but it's a fact of life. Business will always try to provide what is demanded by us, the consumer. Which in the main means cheap and 24/7. Government can only stop this by drastic intervention and I doubt anyone wants that. So lets be sensible and find wherever possible a solution that helps home and foreign farmers and processors, packagers and retailers and their countries by paying a justified price.