Wednesday Wonderings: Badgers

My sister is an animal scientist, therefore I trust her a lot when it comes to animals. In the past six months, badger culls have been constantly thrown back and forth as to whether they would be effective in reducing bovine TB. Badgers only make up a small population of mammals that can carry the infection (pop. ~288,000) whereas there is a large population of deer (pop. unknown) and cats (feral and wild pop. 8.5m) that can carry bovine TB and come in to contact with the cows.

Culling badgers is not the answer, and neither is vaccinating them. Sort out the deer and cats, then start looking at badgers. The poor badgers are a protected species under The Badger Act of 1992. Badgers may not be the cutest (in some people's eyes) or the nicest animal, but they are a national animal. What do MPs have against badgers?

References: BBC, Bovine TB Forum, Binfield Badger Group

Wednesday Wonderings: Processed Food

There has been a lot in the press recently about horse meat being in food that's meant to contain beef.  I follow Daniel Hardcastle on Twitter, and he tweeted something rather funny about it:

You know, the way this horse meat thing is going I bet we find out that cows don't actually exist.
— Daniel Hardcastle (@DanNerdCubed) February 18, 2013

But the horse meat fiasco got me thinking, along with my two of my trigger foods being dairy and tomatoes, I can't actually eat many processed meals anymore (and I don't eat beef anyway). I used to eat lasagne, carbonara, pizza, all things you can just chuck in the microwave or oven for a couple of minutes. I'm really quite glad though because now I know exactly what is going in to my meals, and I have complete control over all of it. The only things I really miss are spinach and ricotta cannelloni and ravioli.
Plus, this is probably a lot healthier too.

Chocolate

I am a huge chocoholic, but when I found out that dairy is one of my trigger foods for my Crohn's I was very upset.  I tried life without chocolate, but I just couldn't live without it.
One weekend, when my boyfriend visited me, we went to Nottingham and enjoyed an afternoon there. We had lunch in a nice little tea house tucked away in the city centre, and on the way back to the car we nipped in to Hotel Chocolat. They were having a 3 for 2 on their Selections, so we bought some dark chocolate ones for me, and he had a white chocolate one.  I have to say, they are the best dark chocolate I have ever had (70%). I have never been a fan of dark chocolate, but Hotel Chocolat has changed my views on it. I particularly like the chocolate covered hazelnuts.
I would definitely recommend their chocolate to anyone who loves milk chocolate, but has found that they can't have it anymore.  Try a bit of everything, you'd be surprised at what you like and don't like.