Fray Bentos - why do we eat this muck?

Bosun Higgs

Bosun Higgs

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I'm an omnivore. I've eaten and mostly enjoyed everything from frogs legs to snake via sea slugs and insects to my mother in laws rabbit stew. I even ate and enjoyed my school dinners. But I found my limit last week when I opened an unwisely bought Fray Bentos steak and kidney pudding.

8 oz pudding with ( memory here since I am now at home) 16% min meat content. So the meat was an ounce or so and didnt look any more. And no doubt, we arent talking here of what most of us would regard as lean meat. In addition there was some quantity of gravy, and the whole content was encased in 6mm or so of something that bore a fair resemblance to warm wet cardboard.

I was hungry but I couldnt finish it. I couldnt find a single whole piece of kidney either.

But I guess the real question is why food companies find it possible to sell such muck to us. They wouldnt get away with it in France for example. So why here? Are we so obsessed with buying the cheapest? Or are we such brand name suckers? Why?
 
Fray Bentos pies are fine

I did buy a FB snake and pigmy pudding because I dont have an oven on the boat.

Not yet plucked up enough courage to try it.

Must do so before much longer as its BB date is 2006 :eek:
 
Yes, I was served one once - it lay on my gut complaining for 24 hours. And I am famous in my family for my ability to eat absolutely anything. It comes from being brought up on post-war rationing. Wasting or even leaving food was a mortal sin in our household.
 
I did. once. Took ages to open the thing and after heating got the same result, no identifiable meat, gravy thinner than water and masses of pastry that defied all efforts to cut it. The final straw was having to find the hoover and use it.

Never, Ever again. Back to the emergency Mars bars.
 
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I eat FB pies, Chicken and mushroom by preferenc. Cook well and enjoy them, I recall that they do have meat.

I did try a FB pudding for one (lunch not a sad Saturday night) and it was as described, a slamm piece of meat in gravy and lots f suit pudding. This was due to the small size of a meal for one.

Morrisson do their own brand and offer chicken tikka as a choice, I have not been tempted!!
 
Think you will find that Fray Bentos is Uraguayan in origin, named after a town on the Argentinian border. It was one of the early processed foods using local beef before the days of refrigerated ships.
 
their not good but not bad either... only eaten when at sea and conditions down in the galley are tricky.

I don't moan about them as a relative works for a company that own the FB canning factory.... and their peanuts in the staff shop....

Personally I prefer M and S tins / curry / chicken / etc.... when at sea.

Note no of this rubbish gets eaten in a marina.... it's all cooked from fresh unless it's a meal in the YC.
 
Brands get traded all the time, so very few are in the hands of the originators. For example OXO was originally made in the same factory in Fray Bentos.

Maybe the Japanese will own it for a while until they get bored and package it up with other brands and sell it on.
 
I went on a sailing hol' with an equally penniless chum on leaving school, and we were really hungry, looking forward to a FB S & K...inedible !

I would even prefer Pot Noodles, and there's probably more meat content, at least seemed less likely to kill me !
 
Our local butcher does unbelievably good steak and ale pies, and they are absolutely stacked full of lovely beef. I have told him to put them in a tin so i can boat cook one but he just laughs at me.

Tim
 
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