BEFORE YOU GO
RETAIL RANDOMS
SHAME
SQUID Leading Spanish wholesaler and importer (their words, not ours), Mevalco, has announced a first for the UK, offering its retail clients Marine Stewardship Council-certified octopus that has been harvested fresh from the Cantabrian Sea. That’s great news for seafood lovers but not so great for normal people. One imagines that the octopuses of Cantabria probably aren’t waving their many limbs in celebration either. And if you’re foaming at the mouth, certain in the knowledge that the plural of octopus is octopi, then wipe your chin – we just checked on Google. It’s definitely octopuses, octopodes at a push. Something to do with it coming from the Greek, not Latin. Go and ask Stephen Fry. Known as Old Fisherman’s Octopus, this sustainability harvested cephalopod apparently differs from those collected in
other places. It has a unique flavour (octopus?) which comes from eating shellfish and is fibrous, with a darker colour. The octopus legs are cut and weighed by hand, presumably by the Old Fisherman. They are immediately
frozen to support flavour and texture and stored for a month before being cooked in their own juices and vacuum-packed to arrive in perfect condition in the UK. In packs of eight, one assumes.
GLOSSING OVER BAD NEWS “May you live in interesting times,” as the apocryphal Chinese curse says. Well, times certainly don’t get much more interesting than 2022. Climate change is wreaking havoc with the weather, the war in Ukraine tops a depressingly long list of conflicts around the world, women in the US no longer have control over their own bodies, and – no matter how much everyone tries to tell it the party’s over – coronavirus refuses to phone itself a taxi and bugger off. Closer to home, the cost of living is rising higher than Australian floodwaters, and the good ship Britain is currently adrift on a sea of uncertainty without a captain. Is it any wonder then that Wickes has run out of optimism?
WEDNESDAY 13TH JULY 2022/ ISSUE 113/ SLRMAG.CO.UK I 39
