Would you ask for a doggy-bag in a restaurant or would you feel too embarrassed to do so?

Doggy bags in which to take home the unfinished part of the restaurant meal you paid for? BBC News reports that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is in favour of these. So is Waitrose Magazine's editor, William Sitwell. I am too. It's a shame for left-over food to be throw away/wasted if you feel you'd like to eat it later. What do you think? If you were eating a meal at home and you felt you'd had enough before you'd cleared the plate, you'd probably save the remainder and put it into the fridge for later, so it would be nice if you could do the same with restaurant food bought and paid for. We should try to avoid waste, especially of food, in my opinion.

I've just been watching the River Cottage programme featuring autumn food on Channel 4 TV

http://www.channel4.com/food/on-tv/river-cottage/
On this webpage there are links to the recipes of some of the dishes featured in the programme.

In this programme Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall makes some unusual dishes using beetroot, cooks a lot of beans, catches and eats some small crabs, organises a Duck Fair, shows us sausages being made, and produces his version of a Chinese duck dish.

It's always worth watching his River Cottage programmes. - He goes in for cooking delicious, healthy food from scratch, not heating up processed junk and pretending it's real food. If you want a healthy body, feed it real food, not junk.

In case you do not already know, processed ready meals are usually extremely high in salt and low in good nutrition, so they tend to make a lot of people fat.

Obesity is caused by salt sensitivity leading to fluid retention and thus to excess weight. There are various causes of salt sensitivity, the most dangerous of which is the reckless prescribing of certain groups of drugs by doctors who have not familiarised themselves with the side-effects of some of the powerful drugs they prescribe - drugs like steroids, ant-depressants and anti-psychotics and certain pain-killers and other drugs.

Giving up dieting, reducing salt intake and eating plenty of good food including plenty of fruit and (unsalted) vegetables and dairy calcium in milk and/or yoghurt (not cheese, because it's salty) will ensure safe loss of excess weight.

See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/.html (The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

prescribed steroids and HRT

vulnerable groups

How to Lose weight!

Children and Obesity

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

See Sodium in foods and

Associated health conditions and

See FAT RETENTION

TV chefs, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver, begin a campaign against the cruelty of intensive chicken production

The shameful price of cheap food

Extract from the Telegraph:

"We are living in the era of cheap food, when you can pick up a chicken in the supermarket for less than the price of a pint of beer. But there is a hidden cost: of the 850 million birds reared in Britain every year, only five per cent have had anything approaching a comfortable life. The vast majority are intensively reared, in prison-camp environments.

Now two of our most celebrated campaigning chefs, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver, are about to try to change our minds, and to ensure that the 25 kilos of chicken meat we each consume a year have come from birds that were decently treated.

Starting next week, Channel 4 is devoting a season of programmes to the nation's eating habits. There will be a one-off Oliver special - Jamie's Fowl Dinners - in which he demonstrates the realities of industrial chicken production, while Fearnley-Whittingstall's aptly titled Hugh's Chicken Run will follow his attempts to set up an intensive farm - in the course of which he is reduced to tears.

The way chickens are reared provides an insight into the intensive techniques used to satisfy our demand for cut-price meat and vegetables. In this world, a bird that will feed a family of five can be raised in a mere 39 days, when before the Second World War it would have needed around 20 weeks to reach the same weight. Modern methods see 40,000 birds packed into one artificially lit barn, reeking to such an extent that if the ventilation system failed they would be gassed by their own droppings. Each bird inhabits a space smaller than a piece of A4 paper, and most will have been de-clawed and de-beaked to prevent them damaging their neighbours. To encourage them to feed continuously, they are given only one hour of darkness in each day. They will never experience natural light or see a blade of grass.

These birds are meant to fatten quickly, so exercise is undesirable. Low light levels keep them drowsy, but as they grow they become so densely packed in as to find movement impossible. Even if they had the notion to try to make it to an open door, they grow so fat that their legs often become useless. During the process of catching and transportation, tens of thousands may die, as they are packed together even more tightly than in their sheds. (Chickens need three times as much air as human beings for their size: in a lorry, they may get almost none.)"