Green Lamb Chops

I had an interesting experience with the lamb chops I bought from my local supermarket the other day.

I like lamb chops. So on my regular shopping run I picked up a couple of chunky specimens from the meat counter. Not too lean – fat equals flavour. And yes, I eat the fat. I can’t stand the prissiness of fellow diners delicately removing every scrap of fat from a piece of meat and leaving it languishing on the side of the plate. Just as I deplore the habit of skinny obsessives who order no-yolk omelettes – what pleasure is there in a plate of wobbling albumen, for God’s sake?

But more on food fads and cholesterol phobia another time.

A couple of days after I bought the chops I decided to cook them. Baked, with a coating of breadcrumbs and parmesan cheese, possibly with a coating of cheddar on top. I say possibly, because the ritual never got further than taking them out of the bag.

On close inspection there was a green tinge on the fatty layer. Hell, I thought. Is this meat off? It smelt OK, but that colour looked very suspect.

So I went to Mother Google and searched on “lamb chops look green”. The results were inconclusive. One piece of advice read:

“Cut off the fat, bin it. Then cut open the chops, look inside them, is it normal coloured, does it smell fresh, and is the texture normal, if not, throw them out.”

The rest of the results were all about recipes for cooking your chops with herbs or green vegetables.

Another piece of advice was:

“Examine the color of the lamb meat in adequate natural light (not store lights or florescent lights). The meat should be pinkish (light or dark) without any gray or tan colors. Gray and tan colors indicate bacteria on the meat.”

And:

“Smell the lamb meat. Bacteria have odors, and these odors become stronger over time. If the meat smells like ammonia or sulfur, this indicates significant bacteria is present.”

And finally:

“Ask meat employees about the lamb meat before purchase, if possible. Inquire when it was cut or unpacked to determine how old it is.”

So these were the options. Cut of the greeny bits and dissect what was left. Have a good sniff, and see if you can detect the essence of rotten eggs, mature baby nappies or worse. Then march back to the supermarket, slap the offending objects on the counter and demand to know the provenance of the meat. Chances are that the “meat employee” will pass the query on to the manager, who will deny any suggestion that the meat was anything other than pristine when I bought it.

If I was in the UK, I would get a replacement, no questions asked. But I’m not. I’m in a country whose local newspapers regularly boast of containers of rotten imported meat being intercepted and destroyed.

How would I know that these bits of lamb were part of a consignment that made it through? That they were once frozen, now thawed? Not without taking them to a lab, and who could be arsed to do that?

So the chops sit festering still in my fridge, waiting to be chucked along with the mouldy Jamie Oliver tomato and garlic sauce that came from the same store.

Is it any wonder that so much food is wasted, when supply chains are so long that a goodly proportion of food is unfit to eat by the time it reaches its destination? My dentist, who comes from Lucknow, tells me that 50% of the food produced in India is wasted. Why? Because the food has to go through middlemen before it reaches the shops. Sometimes the middlemen buy from the farmers, sometimes not. When they can’t find a buyer, the farmers have no option but to chuck their produce away as it goes rotten.

This is a country that supposedly broke the cycle of starvation thirty years ago through super-crops bred in the West to resist pests and bacteria.

Goes to show that you solve one problem and through greed, corruption and disorganisation, another one takes its place.

So from now onwards, if I want lamb chops, I’ll pop down to my local outdoor mixed grill vendor and get myself some nice frazzled sheep remnants. That way I’ll never know where they came from and what state they were in when they hit the grill.

What you don’t know, you don’t worry about, so long as you don’t succumb to e-coli or botulinum toxicum in the process.