to wonder why there are blackberries going bad whilst people complain that they don't have enough money to feed their family healthy food.

[froken]

We went blackberry picking today, I was expecting a couple of manky blackberries to be left because I hear so often in the media and on mumsnet people saying how they struggle to feed their dc healthy food and sometimes people saying they have a hard time finding enough money to feed their dc at all.

There was a huge amount of blackberries, we were a 20 min walk outside a major city so an easily accessible place for 1000s of families.

We picked 9 pounds of blackberries.

Aibu to think that it would be a good idea for those struggling to feed their family a healthy diet (and those struggling to feed their family at all) should be out picking the free fruit that grows all over England's public spaces?

It did and was mad because you were attacking no poster

I think that he is allegedly a cunt as well.

OT, I once had the username JO just for a laugh to call Oliver James a twat. HQ emailed me to ask if they could delete my posts before Jamie came on for the first webchat They were lovely.

Great post Bogey.

Plus he lied and said he worked for NMW when it didn't exist at the time and people took it to mean that when he was starting out in London he lived on it.

What a crock of sh@t, OP. You think a handful of blackberries is going to solve everything?? How to buy food that costs a fortune when you've no money, how to pay all the bills and keep it all together when there's no money, what a completely entitled load of crap your post really is. Have you ever been hungry or cold or suffering from no sleep because life is just too hard? Because if you had I feel sure you wouldn't start such an insensitive post.

Oh, that's happened several time, Vault. JO's heart is with his fucking purse or he'd have shut his fat gob and/or donated every penny of this whole machination to foodbanks and charity a la some others who keep dropping out of the richest lists for giving money they don't need away.

In my opinion, of course

Awaits further deletion.

HQ has stopped emailing me at every deletion, it would require far too much manpower, however carefully I word my posts, which is often enough quite carefully.

My last deletion was for quoting a poster whose inflammatory post was deleted.

she has been as a child citrus but by the sounds of it was blessed with an incredible mother who dragged them through it, sheltered her from the harsh reality of it and even made her think it was 'fun'.

that is indeed incredible of her mother but doesn't make what she did easy or 'ok' or the standard we should aim for for all poor people.

So you're being sort of fast-tracked regarding deletion?

I'm not surprised given what has been going on recently and especially yesterday

Read the thread, Citrus. The OPs posts are aimed at those who rely on 'others' to feed them, ergo, benefits claimants, who are also stupid if they do not forage and bin rake, which is a bit of fun, really.

This is a golden era on MN to be on benefits, be a bereaved parent or want a non-adopted child if you claim even child benefit.

Yes, and I didn't even tell anyone to fuck off, Vault.

The OP lives now in a country with one of the greatest systems of social welfare on the planet, too. It is full of Happy Heidis, however, foraging for food to make up for their great debt to the society which forgives them for being, in particular, single mothers on benefits reliant on others to feed them and their offspring (no mention of the NRPs who are not paying to support their offspring, too).

I thought you could attack the post not the poster?

Late-comers, this thread truly is not about muppets who buy fruit from the supermarket instead of picking it. OP has an agenda and is quite clear about it.

Watching a few episodes of 'Long Lost Families', featuring women forced to give up wanted and loved children even younger than I am, wouldn't go amiss, tbh.

Or Cathy Come Home.

Apparently not, Vault, my last deleted post, that I know of, is on that thread in response to the poster who commented on how parents who have lost a child use their dead children to bully other posters, and was not in breech of guidelines as far as I can read but did quote the inflammatory post.

Again, I fully expect JO is a cunt posts to be shortly deleted. Even though even Daily Fail lets them stand, as long as the cunt is mostly deleted out. :o

That, too. Several of the Long Lost Families episodes (there is another that has finished shooting!) are about such families. Because poor children do not deserve to be kept with their parents, of course, if such parents are unemployed or single. They deserve to bin rake and forage because it is their parents' fault for being stupid and feckless, of course. They should be more resourceful.

This is a laudable quality in civilised, rich societies.

Who is ignorant then?

People started out standing on two legs and foraging. They discovered that farming, even with its drawbacks, gave them more control and reliability of food supply. So they started doing that, rather than foraging and started fighting wars over land fertile enough to give them that control. Must have been a far sight better than foraging then, or else, well, they were stupid, too.

That makes us all stupid, then.

That thread was a disgrace! I was really hoping you wouldn't see it.

Great posts on this one.

Our garden is full of blackberries.

I pop out & fill an old ice cream tub with them every day - then, if it's the weekend, I make crumble or upside down pudding, & if not, I bung 'em in the freezer.

We also have a tree which is groaning with apples & usually make cider - we have the apples, a mate's dad has the press, we split the cider 50/50 - 4 gallons each last year!

However, a) this only happens because we are lucky enough to be relatively comfortably off to start with, ie. we have a nice big back garden with brambles & an apple tree in it. Schlepping miles to pick blackberries covered in road muck & exhaust fumes? Less attractive.

b) I always feel a warm glow when I make a 'free pudding' but it's bollocks, isn't it? Flour & sugar are cheap, butter & eggs less so, & then there's fuel. It's really not going to work out cheaper than a cheap pudding/muffins from Asda.

c) my dc get little pots of blackberries or an apple in their packed lunch all through September. They are already muttering that they'll be glad when we can go back to shop bought satsumas - or even just an apple that isn't small, hard, a bit tasteless & a slightly odd shape.

It's lovely to have the fruit & I make all the use of it I can - but it's never going to be a significant contribution to filling hungry children. & that's with it literally on my doorstep, not foraging for it! Daft idea, OP.

Cathy Come Home was the first time I realised that my naice middle class upbringing wasnt reality for a lot of people.

When I was 15 I said something to my then BF that I still curl up at when i think of it now.

We lived in a naice house on a naice private estate that was very near a council estate. My BF came to pick me up and walked through the estate and I was slagging off everyone who lived there. I basically said that they were all work shy scroungers and if they worked a bit harder they could buy their own house. Mrs T would have been in heaven had she heard me.

BF was quiet and then said that he lived in a council house. Needless to say he dumped me, I dont blame him. I saw CCH just a few months later at school, and then I got it.

What fools, eh? Dying by the tens of thousands over lands with black soil to grow food when they could just supplement from the supermarkets with wild foraging? Even been to Alsace and into the Black Forest? Seen what grows there? It's just about everything, and the reason so many millions died to have it.

Damn, they could have just foraged and gone to the supermarket.

So many died through here, when rival clans came and stole their livestock in Autumn or Winter, and guess what? When you rely on nature to give you food it's often enough you will starve that is why they started keeping livestock and farming what they could in the first place! It's even bad enough when crops fail (Google Irish Famine) but more so when you are relying on food going volunteer.

But let's race back to that bottom and see where we end up.

'Cathy Come Home was the first time I realised that my naice middle class upbringing wasnt reality for a lot of people.'

My mother grew up in such a way. Her father grew up one of 15 children who lived, in abject poverty, his mother dying age 42 of over-work and too many babies, determined his children would have a different life.

And they did.

Until her friend at her lovely, private girls school became pregnant in 1957, age 16

A private abortion was arranged for her.

She bled to death and then her boyfriend hanged himself. Both their families had to leave town.

That was when she started to realise it is not a good world that condemns people for being human.

Oh, the reason they couldn't marry? They were of different religions.

expat I trust you realise people like that cunt are not even worth thinking about. Their views are the views of a different species to myself. To me there comes a point when an opinion or comment is so ridiculous that it ceases to be viable.

Blackberry vodka, that is the way forward.

The poor can distill potatoes to make their spirit. There are still sugar beet at the edge of the fields, no need to trouble Aldi for refined white sugar.

Job done, nearly free, delicious booze.

Really though, this thread should be printed and bound and send out along with tax credit forms. It would save the government millions.

You cant even Supermarket Bin Rake in my Area. Everything from the Tesco to the Iceland has security to stop people shifting through the out of date stuff they couldnt sell that have only been thrown in their Bins/Cage things . SwallowedAFly No. Thankfully. Asthma :(. Getting back to the point I know exactly where there Is an abundance of Blackberries. It just takes 2 bus rides out there and by the time Ive paid Dds bus fares too I may aswell have bought two punnets from Waitrose and it would still work out cheaper