Meat is getting rather expensive and fresh is always better.!!! You can go to your local supermarket and buy a nice "New Zealand fresh" leg of lamb, take out a bank loan to pay for it and have it for Sunday dinner or your can by a freshly killed and butchered leg of lamb which lived locally for half the price. Hotels and restaurants can buy it too.
New Zealand fresh is a sick joke in any case. Think about it! It takes 6 weeks for a refrigerated ship to travel from NZ to the UK, just for starters. It has to be killed,butchered and packaged which adds another, minimum two weeks. It may have to wait in a cold store, as it has missed to boat.Another 3 weeks. It all has to be unpacked and distributed when it arrives in Uk.Another 2 weeks. so your fresh lamb is a minimum 3 months old by the time you buy it. More like three years or more to increase profits.!!!!
Intervention beef, stored in the beef mountains, can remain frozen for up to 10 years or more, before being released for sale to the public. Therefore it was bought 12 years before it was finally sold. Even with storage costs that still adds up to mega profits. It would only have gone into intervention status, if there had been a glut on the market at the time.!! So it was bought very cheaply indeed. It may now even have been British beef making it cheaper still!! just consider the profits accruing especially, if you are a huge chain, with farms, meat packing plants and cold stores like Union Cold Store for instance.
Sugar is another joke as is salt. Salt is mined in Siberia as well as other places and comes out of mines. So they dig it out, clean it up, package it and store it for years before a wholesaler gets near it. Wholesalers store it for years too.It does not go off and could quite easily be 30 years old or more.
Sugar is much the same. It is grown on plantations, mainly in the Caribbean and refined. Tate and Lyle and the big market leaders. They own plantations, refineries, a fleet of ships and lorries and huge storage facilities all over the World. Some forty years ago they had to close a huge storage facility near the docks, why travel too far from the boats, in Greenock in Scotland. The hundredweight bags or 50 kilos if you prefer, had to be moved to a brand new store in Glasgow some 20 miles away. This place was so big and was filled to the rafters, so that their lorries were running back and forwards 24/7 for months!!!! Eventually, as demolition dates loomed they had to bring in outside contractors to provide even more lorries Each lorry could carry 38 tonnes. They could do, in a ten hour driving shift, travelling on a brand new motorway, having the bags on pallets of 1 tonne at a time, loaded and unloaded by a fleet of fork lift trucks, many runs per day. Some used two trailers at each store,with a unit inside the Greenock and Glasgow stores, to move them about. These inside units did not need very expensive road tax, insurance or needed to be completely road worthy and well shod, as they ran inside the plant. They could be run on red diesel too, which is much cheaper, all inside the plant. They were towed and left there. This made contractors rather rich. Some wagons pulled bulk tanks, which were filled from silos of loose sugar. You can get the picture. It was a huge move of stored sugar.
Now, I just know you are awaiting the punch line,!!! Well here you are. The bags were stamped War Department and dated in the mid 1930's, 1935 /36 and 37, when the Uk was stocking up on sugar. The British fighting man could not operate, without a cup of tea!!. Ships would be in danger crossing the Atlantic and could be used for other things, in any case. All the time, that appeasement was going on, with documents being signed and Chamberlain flying back and forwards to Berlin, Britain was stocking up for a War, that they knew was going to come.!!! Not only that, but it was being stored far enough away, to be considered safe and out of range, for German bombers. Now that is forward planning and profiteering on a grand scale. The sugar was 35 years old at least more like 40. Oh and Greenock was not their only storage facility, by the way!!!
Nice one Tate and Lyle and remember they owned the transport, storage and the sugar plantations, too!!!
A nice little earner if you consider that new stock could only be put in as the old stock was sold off. So the sugar in your coffee today could be, being kind, 25 years old!!!!
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