By Julie Blackburn

I really do try to cook as many meals as possible from scratch and I’m lucky that our small farm has its own ’home grown’ eggs and lamb as well as the wide range of wonderful local Manx meat and produce that is available to all of us in the island.

But the other day as I was whizzing round the food department of a well known local supermarket I spotted some ’Plant Kitchen’-branded, ’no beef’ burgers. And yes I know: usually the only reason for buying a burger that isn’t made from beef is if it’s made from Loaghtan lamb.

But I have been known to make a halfway decent haloumi burger so I’ve nothing against a veggie-type burger in principle.

The two burgers in this pack were such a pretty shade of pink that I assumed they were mostly beetroot and I’m very fond of beetroot so I shoved them in my basket and paid for them without giving them too much attention.

When I got them home and checked the back of the packet I discovered that they were made from ’cooked soya protein’ with the addition of no less than 17 other ingredients including ’stabiliser E61’, ’dried onions’ and ’dextrose’. One of them, to be fair, was ’Colour: Beetroot Red’ so I wasn’t so far out in my assumption except I am wondering just what exactly that has to do with real beetroot at all?

Another ingredient was palm oil and we all know what the proliferation in the use of that stuff is doing to the Indonesian rain forest and its endangered orangutans.

All of which is fine if you’re happy eating this sort of unidentifiable rubbish which has about as much in common with real food as a tea towel.

And if you don’t mind that something labelled ’Plant Kitchen’ doesn’t appear to contain any plants at all, certainly not in the way you and I understand plants to be.

The problem is that this is an item clearly intended to appeal to the vegan market and veganism is nearly always promoted for its apparent health benefits.

Nothing essentially wrong with that, veganism theoretically should be perfectly healthy if you are making meals yourself from lots of lovely, fresh local vegetables (and you’re finding another way of getting the vitamin B12 you can normally only get from meat and dairy products).

What’s not OK is when people with, presumably, the best of intentions - to be nice to animals, save the rain forest and eat healthily - are targeted by the food industry and persuaded to buy something that is probably marginally less healthy - and definitely a lot less ’natural’ - than the burger in a Big Mac.

That is not OK at all.