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Britain has an unenviable international reputation for food, as exemplified by the ever-charming Jacques Chirac's famous slur: 'You can't trust people who cook as badly as that.' While Chirac also enjoys an unenviable international reputation, his comments about English food are rooted in a deep seated continental distaste for English cuisine. Fortunately, attitudes towards food in the UK are rapidly changing and people are starting to think both about their diet and about eating good quality food, cooked well.

More and more British people have taken an interest in gourmet food in the past ten years, inspired, in no small part, by the glut of gastroporn television which hits the terrestrial channels every evening. Everything from gourmet ready meals to venison is flying off the shelves of upmarket retailers around the country. A new wave of stores is opening up and down Britain to cope with this new demand for top quality food; cafe/shops like Carluccio's and the cook/eat chain are doing a roaring trade in wealthier parts of the land.

It is not just these new chains which are benefiting from Britain's new attitude to cooking - old fashioned fishmongers and butchers are benefiting after years of being squeezed hard by the supermarkets. 100 years ago, every village and town in Britain had a fishmonger, a butcher and a baker, and people had a better basic diet as a result of it. Fancy food was seen as the preserve of top London hotels and restaurants. Now, while London's restaurants are some of the best in the world, more people are taking good food seriously and are cooking at home.

The internet has also helped to kickstart this food revolution in the UK. Lovers of excellent seafood can buy smoked salmon and buy caviar online from a number of excellent retailers who previously made a living from supplying hotels and restaurants. If you wish to buy caviar, now is an interesting time as the international trade has all but ground to a halt. Overfishing of the Caspian Sturgeon has pushed the species close to extinction. It takes 20 years for each fish to reach the maturity required to produce eggs and it looks like there will soon be none left. Attempts are being made to commercially farm sturgeon, but, again, this will take years to produce any caviar, and nobody is sure about the quality of what will be produced. The finest Beluga and Oscietra caviar will probably always come from wild fish, but this is unsustainable.

It seems unlikely that Britain's newfound passion for food is just a fad, but everyone is agreed that more effort should be made in schools to educate children about the importance of eating healthily so the future health of the nation can be guaranteed.