11am-4pm Sunday 6th August, Boundary Road, Bidston, CH43 7PD. Fun Day with stalls, face painting, games, activities and Greasby Ukes! Free admission, as always; come and have fun and support your urban farm. See goats, pigs, ponies, alpacas, rabbits, guinea pigs and poultry galore. The farm no longer receives any Council funding so please make a donation when you visit, if you can.

I love Tam O'Shanter, it's a fabulous little place for the young and young at heart. Having a great appreciation of piggies, last time I went there, as the piggies grunted around their stys, the café were serving bacon butties and the aroma gently wafted it's way across.

How does one explain that to children ?

Gosh...was taking my kids there 25 years ago..how time flies as well as pigs

Easy granny, tell them bacon comes from an ambush

Has the cafe hygiene been improved yet?

https://www.foodhygieneratings.org.uk/shanterz-wirral

Part of the farm's role is educational, so the piggies/bacon link makes sense. People need to understand where their food comes from; then they can decide whether or not they want to eat it. Children are becoming very separated from the 'facts of life' food-wise these days e.g. 'Carrots come out of the dirty GROUND? Eeeww...'.

Cafe hygiene issue was sorted out some time ago and it's awaiting regrading. There were mice getting into the premises - they're all over the place, it's a farm! - but that has been dealt with professionally, so no problem there any more.

I have to say I have always enjoyed the cafe and never experienced any problems over the years.

I can partially agree with you Greenwood, however children also need to be educated into healthy eating, and pork is not healthy eating. Hospitals give guidelines for diets after cancer, and pork is an unhealthy food, probably one of the worst for various reasons. Pigs are scavengers, and eat anything, digest their own urine, and toxins stay within the body as pigs hardly sweat to get rid of the toxins. Just one point to be considered, but children wouldn't understand all of that.
They might understand that eating bacon,suasages, ham and hot dogs for example increases risk from cancer, as stated by the World Health Organisation, but would they understand the implications of cancer ? Two pieces of bacon regularly increases chances of cancer by 9%
Not having a pop at you Greenwood, but it is something everyone should be aware of and rather than promoting pigs for eating, it should be discouraged if we wish to see cancer rates cut in the future.
We could of course bring them back on a massive scale for getting rid of all our human waste. That's what they are meant to do.

Uggg Granny!! Just eating a bacon sarnie as I read your post.Put me right off now, well maybe just finish this one, lol. Must admit Pork not my favourite meat but sorry to say I do like my bacon and ham butties.

If we listened to everything they tell us is bad for us we would never eat.

Enjoy it ,Cools.
I used to love bacon and a big fat chop to get teeth stuck into,or a ham and mustard buttie but for various reasons, the advise given and decision was to bin the piggies .

Probably too late for you Dilly carry on, but I'm thinking of our children's, children.

We have been eating bacon since the pig was invented

Maybe the farm's role is simply to help youngsters be aware of where their food comes from in the first place, because some children seem not to know that; getting into the whole cancer angle is probably a bit too heavy-duty for what the farm's set up to do. It's the responsibilitiy of parents to see that their children eat and live healthily and the responsibility of various health bodies to ensure that adults know what's healty and what isn't. For the children, it's more a case of - here's a pig, some people eat them but too much is bad for you/here's a hen, hens lay eggs out of their back ends but that's perfectly normal, don't worry about it/ here's an allotment, it grows veg etc.

Maybe not since they were invented Dilly, although if we live long enough now (which they never did generations ago) we now have a 1 in 2 chance of getting cancer. Could that be attributed to our diets of processed food as we are certainly eating more and more of it on a daily basis.

Maybe Tam O'Shanter's cafe ,cook and serve their own free range piggies, which is what must be getting promoted at T.O'sh's.
That could be a massive improvement on the supermarkets and the cheapest products sold, which I wouldn't touch with a barge pole. but they probably don't because it's an outside company not Council run.

Enough..... not going to fall out over Tam O'Shanter's because it's a great little place.