Food served in edible bowls

Just to prove there is nothing new under the sun, Butt Foods, a Birmingham based food firm has started making bowls and plates out of dough - and why not the concept has been tried and tested by history. This is and entrepreneurial recycling and updating of the idea.

It may save on washing up and is more environmentally friendly than paper plates.

The company is already supplying a chain of pubs with prawn cocktail-filled bread bowls and says that later this year a leading supermarket is planning to sell its microwavable naan bowl filled with chicken tikka masala.

The bowls can apparently hold their shape for eight hours without going soggy.

The technical term for such a thing would be trencher.

In medieval times trenchers were plates cut from (dried or stale) loaves of bread. Food and such were served on them. People ate off them.

At banquets used trenchers, soaked in rich gravy and sauces with food remains were presented to the poor, or thrown to the dogs.

You can still get dry‘village bread’ in Greece with tomato and feta served on it, though the whole thing is usually on a plate. The Cornish pasty originally embodied a similar but more mobile lunch box type concept.

Healthy living promotes a longer life

Research done by the University of Cambridge and the Medical Research Council in Norfolk between 1993 and 2006 involving 20,000 people has revealed the startling information that:

Taking exercise, drinking in moderation, eating enough fruit and vegetables and not smoking can add up to 14 years to your life.

This held true regardless of how overweight, or poor people were.

To paraphrase John Cleese - Can we get them on Mastermind? Next contestant, University of Cambridge and the Medical Research Council, specialist subject: The bleedin' obvious.

How much did this study cost?

My mother was telling me exactly that in the seventies (except for the exact figure of 14 years) I very much doubt she was the only one - maybe they should have paid her and had the benefit of the information 30 years earlier?

Come to think of it, if they had asked, she would have happily advised them for free, better to have asked me - after she had told me...