Jacqueline

Use to love to bake often but now do very little. Sadly can now only have memories of my Petit Bassett (RIP little boy) but still enjoy life's simple pleasures.

[Jacqueline @jacbakes]

@clairelicence @JacquiDeevoy1 @f_loveoflife Men will probably feel better knowing someone is helping them support their needs and assisting with care of parent. An extra income can also help considerably. Sounds like this requires a specific dating website! A hole in the market maybe!

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The largest wildfire in Spanish history was not put out. It ran west of Madrid through July, burned across the dish complex Spain uses to talk to spacecraft, emptied sixty thousand houses, and then the wind changed and it stopped. By the middle of this month the year's total stood near three hundred thousand hectares, about triple the average.

Water bombers flew all summer. Nothing they did decided anything. What decides it is what is standing on the hill before the match.

And what is standing on the hill is sixty years of nobody.

The young went to the cities and the villages let go one field at a time. The terraces stopped being cut. The flocks came off. Scrub came up through all of it, joined itself together, and grew into a single unbroken carpet from the roadside to the ridge, with a eucalyptus plantation across the northwest for good measure, an Australian tree with oily leaves, which is the forestry equivalent of insulating your loft with fireworks.

There had been something eating that carpet since before Rome. It left for Madrid in about 1965.

In 2007 somebody in Andalusia did the arithmetic and reached for the oldest tool in the shed. The scheme is called RAPCA, which sounds like a nightclub and is in fact a public register of firebreaks maintained by goats. A technician walks the ground and marks the strips that matter. A shepherd signs a contract. Then he takes his flock up there and they eat it, all summer, for forty-two to ninety euros a hectare. No machinery. No water. No helicopter.

Two hundred and twenty shepherds are now on that register.

It spread the way things spread when they work, into Extremadura, into Murcia this year, over the border to the Serra da Estrela, and out to Gran Canaria, where a certified flock can earn its keeper twelve thousand a year for the specific service of keeping a mountain from going up.

The goat is not doing anybody a favour. It would rather have the brush. Put one in a decent meadow and it will walk straight past the grass to get at the scrub on the bank, because browse is what a goat is for, and the scrub on the bank is the ladder the fire climbs. It holds slopes no vehicle will hold. It works at forty degrees without a rota. Its fee is the grazing and somebody to sell the cheese.

In Girona, Judite Nadal keeps sheep and goats for exactly this work. Her complaint is not that it is hard. It is that hardly anybody books it. People are not conscious of the risk, she says, until the fire is inside the house.

Brussels has meanwhile ended up holding two documents about the same animal.

In one it is an emissions line.

In the other it is infrastructure.

Both are current. Neither department appears to have rung the other.

Catalonia went one further and put it on a label, so meat and cheese off the fire flocks is sold as such in the village shops, and a family buying chops on a Friday is buying a firebreak. First honest food label anyone has printed this decade.

The oldest job in the Mediterranean is being advertised as an innovation. Young Spaniards are taking it up for the first time in three generations, mostly because it now comes with a contract.

The goats know none of this. They were doing it before Rome, they were doing it while the impact assessment was being drafted, and they will be doing it in September when the smoke clears and somebody publishes a review.

Nobody has yet worked out how to invoice them.

[Jacqueline @jacbakes]

@Jojo01167846981 @aliceesolsen @macmillancancer @CR_UK @SU2C @UKLabour @NHSuk I think it just goes to show how much corruption there is. Do you think they are all in it together?!

[Jojo @Jojo01167846981]

@aliceesolsen @macmillancancer @CR_UK @SU2C @UKLabour @NHSuk Have any of these cancer charities said anything yet?
I’ve not seen anything.

[Jo E @Superjomax]

Part one of new letter - #removefolicacid

Your full name]
[Your address]
[Your postcode]
[Your email]
[Your phone number – optional]
[Date]
[MP’s full name]
Member of Parliament for [Constituency]
[House of Commons address or email via theyworkforyou / write-to-them]

Dear [Mr/Ms/Mrs] [Surname],
Re: Mandatory folic acid fortification of non-wholemeal wheat flour – concerns regarding legal basis, scale of impact, and public health implications

I am writing as your constituent to express serious concern about the Bread and Flour (Amendment) Regulations 2024 (and equivalent measures across the UK), which require the mandatory addition of synthetic folic acid to non-wholemeal wheat flour from 13 December 2026. These regulations were made under powers in the Food Safety Act 1990.

The stated aim is to prevent approximately 200 neural tube defects each year. While the protection of unborn children is of course important, the measure will expose the vast majority of the UK population — more than 67 million people — to an additional synthetic substance in everyday food on a permanent basis. This includes an estimated 3.5 million people living with cancer, many of whom are advised by the NHS that folic acid may be unsuitable or should only be taken under medical supervision.
I ask you to consider the following points carefully.

1. Legal framework from 1990 applied to a transformed food system
The enabling power dates from the Food Safety Act 1990. In the intervening 36 years the food supply, manufacturing technology, population size and health profile, dietary patterns, and the role of basic staples have changed beyond recognition. Non-wholemeal wheat flour is no longer primarily a component of bread and home baking. It is routinely used as a filler, thickener, carrier or processing aid in a wide range of mass-produced products designed for long shelf life — including many cooking sauces, gravies, ready meals, processed foods, cereals, and other everyday items that form the dietary backbone for millions of families.
The 1990 legislation could not have contemplated this degree of integration. Yet the 2024 regulations extend the fortification requirement across this modern supply chain without any corresponding update to the scope of the original powers or any clear statutory guidance on when population-wide intervention is proportionate.

2. Absence of numerical or proportionality guidance
Nothing in the Food Safety Act 1990, or in the regulations themselves, provides criteria or thresholds for weighing the number of people who stand to benefit against the number who will be exposed without choice or therapeutic need. The decision therefore rests entirely on ministerial judgement. A measure that permanently alters the food supply of tens of millions of people — including large groups for whom the NHS itself issues cautions — in order to prevent around 200 cases annually raises fundamental questions of logic, ethics and proportionality that Parliament has never explicitly authorised or debated.

TBC in next comment

[Jo E @Superjomax]

The law: medicine cannot be added to food supply.

Government: folic acid is a vitamin

NHS government website:
“Folic acid is a medicine that's”

Also see list the NHS say cannot take it
“You have cancer” is only 1 of approx 12 other big things

That one line and 3 words represents 3.5 million people alone.

It is a synthetic medicine by the NHS health description. It is harmful to millions.

This is illegal as there are no actual numbers that could positively demonstrate what the government says ‘saving 200 babies’
It is illegal to medicate people without choice. We have no choice - it is medicine by own admission. It is harmful to millions own admission, it violates our freedom of choice and human rights.
@ClareCraigPath
We must build momentum and ensure everyone is aware and get it removed immediately.

https://t.co/aAE3frzR91

[Jacqueline @jacbakes]

@Martina Could it be part of their contract??

[Jacqueline @jacbakes]

@durhamsafc1994 That’s okay. Do what you need to do.

[Dr Clare Craig @ClareCraigPath]

@mssuzcatsilver If it has flour in it probably has folic acid in.

The manufacturers have admitted they are not bothering with labelling yet.

https://t.co/dtyxBUhLkK

[Jacqueline @jacbakes]

@durhamsafc1994 Hoping you both get through the day with some happy memories keeping you buoyant. I’m sure your mam will be watching over you both and helping from afar with your next chapters in life. Sending love to you both.

[Jacqueline @jacbakes]

@ShaunRickard67 @BeverlyArtis6 Absolutely no! I don’t agree with there being mayors though as a society should be built on democracy and not based on one persons decision, lording over all that happens locally.

[Sharron Davies HoL MBE @sharrond62]

My 90 yr old dad was rushed into hospital with on going gallbladder issues. His pre op has been cancelled twice already. He has been moved bed 4 times, in the process losing his hearing aid charger, making it very difficult for him to hear properly, & causing extreme stress. It has now been found. But, every time he was moved he missed food order so was offered sandwiches. Better than nothing but not ok for several days. Friends have now brought in cooked food. He had an operation & they missed removing the main stone, but put in a stent. He will go back into surgery today or tomorrow to get that stone. I’m grateful for his medical treatment & the caring staff, but this is a man who’s still working at 90 contributing to society (still coaching swim kids), was a member of our armed forces, where he lost an eye, & never taken a handout, ever! Our NHS is utterly broken.

[Jacqueline @jacbakes]

@Kryfold_Sky @diesel353 @icecoldg_t @waitrose @ClareCraigPath I don’t know, seems like plenty of people haven’t woken up to the fact that folic acid is bad.

[Jacqueline @jacbakes]

@ClareCraigPath Sorry but learning to be kind should be something you are taught from crawling age and should have nothing to do with university! University should be about gaining knowledge in your speciality although it’s clear the knowledge they want you to have to what they tell you.

[Jacqueline @jacbakes]

@AliDawn20 @andrzej10920 @tizdesigns ..happen and stored it in the freezer but unfortunately no knowing if it does contain folic acid (is there a home test kit available?! 😆). Also if storing in containers put some bay leaves in to prevent weevils .

[Jacqueline @jacbakes]

@AliDawn20 @andrzej10920 @tizdesigns Organic flour is also being added to. Check with Shipton Mill as they seem to me to be relatively big and may be mandated to add it. Just because it’s not on the packet doesn’t mean it’s not been added. So frustrating. I bought a load of flour a while back knowing this would 1/2

[Jacqueline @jacbakes]

@ClareCraigPath That label is printed in store so really should be updated after all there’s no packaging that needs using up (not that that is a justifiable excuse in my book!).

[Jacqueline @jacbakes]

@JacquiDeevoy1 @Carmilla5 It’s annoying though when the money could, SHOULD, be spent on better things! But the NHS wastes colossal amounts of money, always has just seems to be gettingworse. 😞

[Dr Clare Craig @ClareCraigPath]

Doctors did try and warn us.

Sign the petition below.

[Jacqueline @jacbakes]

@DebiEvansMatron You’ve got a lot of of responses but I grow mine in buckets as easier to find all the spuds. Potentially need more water (but at least you can move them into the shade, or sunlight as needed). I use this site on YouTube for growing veg. It’s very helpful https://t.co/7AZqZjyWYp