Worcester sauce

Phew. Worcestershire sauce is fine. Luckily, it seems to have escaped the whole furore about the Sudan 1 dye, which for those of you who don't know, is a red dye most commonly used in shoe and floor polish. Somehow, it's ended up in a batch of chilli powder, which was used by a company called Premier Foods to make a batch of Worcester sauce. That sauce was, in turn, used in all sorts of ready meals and convenience foods, for all the major supermarkets and manufacturers. It's carcinogenic in rats, so as a precaution thousands of products are being recalled and removed from the shelves. If ever there was a story to encourage people to make their own food from their own raw ingredients, that's the one.

As you may imagine, it's all over the newspapers, in various forms. The Guardian has an interesting article on how so many ready meals have been affected, because different supermarket brands all come from the same supplier. The Daily Mail points out that it's spread to school meals, and the Times that it's spread to some NHS wards. It all just goes to show how little cooking takes place anywhere these days - it's all reheated gloop which has been mass-processed in factories. And they wonder why, with people full of E-numbers, sugars, salts, additives and shoe polish dyes that the health of the population is going downhill.

Rant over. Back to my cheese on toast with Worcestershire sauce...