Hilary Smith, Co-op member and Boycott Israel Network (BIN) agricultural trade campaign coordinator, was quoted by The Guardian as saying that the Co-op "has taken the lead internationally in this historic decision to hold corporations to account for complicity in Israel's violations of Palestinian human rights. We strongly urge other retailers to take similar action."

The Co-op has fallen over itself to announce that, no, they're not actually boycotting Israel, you understand. Just any Israeli companies that deal with produce from not just the West Bank, but any from over the Green Line. So that will include all the wines from the Golan Heights, and matzos and other religious goods baked or made in the Old City of Jerusalem but also all the produce that's exported from Gaza. And of course all the produce which Palestinian farmers in the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights produce.

You see, Palestinian Arab farmers are completely dependent on the high-tech logistics and technologies of the Israel-wide exporters like Agrexco, Mehadrin and all those other companies the Co-op's decided to boycott for the fast processing, refrigeration, air transport, EU certification and marketing. Without those companies exporting their produce to the UK, guess what? Those Palestinians will lose money hand over fist, if they're not driven completely out of business, by the loss of their currently very efficient Israeli exporters. There aren't any other local non-Israeli companies they can turn to. Try Jordan or Egypt? Not a chance.

Here's the viewpoint of a Gazan woman producer whose business and family was hit by the closing of the route to Europe via Agrexco after the Israelis shut the Keren Shalom checkpoint after an outburst of Hamas terrorist action.

Um Hajjar Al-Ghalayini, 46 years old, owns half an acre of sandy Gaza land that produces two tons of strawberries every season. Since her husband died two years ago, the crop is the sole means of support for her nine children, mother-in-law and widowed sister, so every one of the bright red berries counts.

Last year, she had no choice but to sell her produce to the local market. That filled the Gaza markets with fruits and vegetables to the benefit of consumers, but for growers like Um Hajjar it was a disaster. Her earnings dropped by more than half and the family had a tough year economically. This week, as Israel took another step in easing its economic blockade of the Gaza Strip, Um Hajjar delivered her strawberries to the Kerem Shalom checkpoint on the Israel-Gaza border, their first leg of a journey to the more profitable markets in Europe.

“Now I can say that things are getting back to normal, if not on the right track,” she told The Media Line.

Just last week in London, Livingstone declared himself against boycotts of Israeli goods and services at a meeting with Jewish Londoners. His Deputy Mayoral candidate running mate Val Shawcross proudly declared herself a member of the Co-operative Party.

The Co-operative Group is formally affiliated with the Co-operative Party which although nominally independent is an organization whose sole party political link is to the Labour Party. Co-operative Party election candidates stand for election as Labour candidates.

So, apart from Livingstone and Val Shawcross, there's a long list of 29 Co-operative Party MPs, who include many who are usually supportive of Israel and strongly opposed to boycotts. Those MPs include Louise Ellman, Luciana Berger, Stephen Twigg and Mike Gapes amongst others. And quite a few of them are London Assembly members, too, like Nicky Gavron and Murad Qureshi.

Are they in favour of boycotting the produce of Palestinian farmers? Do they think kosher wines from the Golan Heights and matzos baked in the Old City of Jerusalem should be boycotted?

Will the Labour London Assembly members be pressing for Palestinian and Israeli produce exported by Agrexco, Mehadrin and the other companies fingered by the Co-op to be banned from the GLA's premises?

"We will not finance any organisation that advocates discrimination and incitement to hatred."

The right to freedom of speech underpins the values of a democratic society and individuals and organisations should be free to express their views or beliefs. However, 99% of customers who participated in the review supported the bank's decision to withhold finance from those extremist organisations that advocate not only discrimination but hatred.

Can Livingstone, Val Shawcross and all those Co-op MPs and London Assembly members let us know whether they support the Viva Palestina project of collecting funds which are given to Hamas regime officials? Can they also explain to us how they are satisfied that the Co-op Bank is not contravening its own policies in allowing itself to be used to collect and pass wads of used banknotes to and through Hamas, which has a stellar record of suppressing free speech and inciting hatred of Jews and Israel, not least through its own Charter?

If they think the money is just going to charitable work and is untouched by the Hamas hate machine, what are the processes they have used to monitor that?

Oh, and by the way, that's bankers in the spotlight again, isn't it? Only somehow, I can't quite see Ed Miliband getting up on his hind legs to fulminate about this at Prime Minister's Question Time, can you?

I'm a fan of the Body Shop's Tea Tree Oil Face Mask. It was my daughter who introduced me to it--she had the usual teenage angst about the tiny amount of acne she suffered, but she found it helped. I tried it despite not having any acne, and I've been using it ever since. It has two almost magical effects, the second of which may be confined to me alone.

The first and most magical thing is does is instantly to appear to remove a film of crud from my face, so that it looks startlingly brighter and fresher once I've used it. I'm still surprised by the difference, every time.

Now the second apparently magical result seems to have something to do with its being a luminous intense green cream which you smear on your face till you look like you might be taking part in an anthropological documentary about the rituals of some obscure rainforest tribe. Cue for the magical effect. Without fail, someone will come and ring the doorbell. It happens to me every time almost without exception, and I've managed to startle quite a range of friends, neighbours, postmen, meter readers and delivery men that way.

Because of magical effect (1), I've become quite inured to the embarrassment of magical effect (2).

So I was miffed when it went out of stock at The Body Shop. They kept promising they'd have some soon, but "soon" turned out to be about four months. Meanwhile, I tried one or two of their other face masks, but none of the others were a patch on the Tea Tree Oil one. True, one painted me blue and did not seem to produce the doorbell-rings phenomenon, but it wasn't worth changing to.

So when Tea Tree Oil Face Mask came back into stock, I ordered a load of it. I didn't want to be left without it again. And with the order, I got a little pack of freebies, mainly little sample pots of Body Shop's latest products.

I gave the samples to my daughter; she's much more open than I am to experimenting with new toiletries and beauty products. Once I discover something I like, I'll just keep on using it unless I'm presented with strong evidence that something else might be better.

I didn't think any more about it. Then a few days ago, I got this email from my daughter:

I tried some of the Moringa Seed Oil Body Butter - I'd used other body butters from Bodyshop before, so I wasn't really worried about it, and not being food, it didn't even enter my head to check the label. I didn't put it on my face (thank goodness) but put some on my back and chest. A couple of minutes later I was about to go to bed, and realised that I was becoming short of breath.

I thought this was odd as I'd taken my night-time antihistamine (one of the stronger 6-8 hours ones) about an hour beforehand and had been fine, and this was very sudden.

I tried lying down to see if it would help, and could feel my airways contracting and the prickly itching under my chin that makes me think "I've eaten Brazil nuts". I was confused though, as I hadn't eaten anything, so I called B in and asked him to check the ingredients on the body butter. I have no idea what Moringa seed is, so it could have been a new allergy that I'd need help with, but jokingly said, "There isn't anything like brazil nuts in that stuff, is there?" Checking the ingredients, brazil nut oil was one, so I found that I had rubbed into my skin a reasonable amount of the stuff. Being very greasy and already rubbed in, it was hard to get off, but I washed it off and took a ridiculous amount of antihistamines, and thankfully didn't get to the stage where I had to use my Epipen.

Took me about an hour to get to to stage where I was breathing easily enough to go back to bed.

My daughter has a severe brazil nut allergy. This first emerged when she was two, and I fed her a brazil nut one evening. Within minutes, she was screaming and her face swelled and puffed out till she looked like a baby version of the Phantom of the Opera. I gave her a couple of spoonfuls of liquid anti-histamine for kids and called out the emergency doctor, who told me I'd done the right thing. It took almost a day for her to recover. Any time after that that she's accidentally come into contact with any trace of brazil nuts-- a single chocolate in a selection of pralines, even salad from a salad bowl that had previously had brazil nuts in it-- she's had the same extreme reactions, of which the accompanying breathing difficulties are the most alarming.

But neither she nor I had suspected that beauty products might contain brazil nut ingredients. And there wasn't any warning on the product. I looked up Moringa Seed Oil Body Butter on the Body Shop web site. It's advertised as "new" and even bears an endorsement from Good Housekeeping Magazine, but there's nothing in the instructions or "tips" on the sites to alert you to what the effect of using the product could be if you have brazil nut allergy.

This is the list of ingredients carried on the web site:

Do you know the botanical name for brazil nuts? I didn't, despite my daughter's allergy. It's Bertholletia Excelsa. So you would only realise that if you knew. My daughter's never been aware of brazil nuts as a component in a cosmetic product, so she hadn't checked the label before she used it. She told me that the actual pot does include an identification of Bertholletia Excelsa as brazil nuts.

Nowhere on the Body Shop site have I been able to find any indication that there might be problems of any sort for allergy sufferers with any of their products.

I did a web search to find whether there were any sites that picked up similar reactions with Body Shop products. I found this,this and this .

What most concerns me is this apparent response from the Body Shop's Consumer Help Desk in Canada:

Thank you for taking the time to write to us.

Because anaphylactic allergies are dangerous, we cannot guarantee any of our products to be nut-free. Our manufacturers use the same equipment to make different products so we cannot guarantee against the possibility of cross-contamination in any of the products we carry.

We hope this information helps. If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

Consumer Help Desk The Body Shop Canada

As an approach to Consumer Help, I'd say it must deserve a place in a Hall of Shame for which there's quite a lot of competition. However, that's the Canadian branch.

I'll be writing to the UK Body Shop. For a start, that sample of Moringa Seed Oil Body Butter was included in a "free gift" given out unsolicited to customers. Had it been tested for allergy reactions? Does the Body Shop give any warnings to its customers about potential allergic reactions? How do they respond to customers who experience them? And what do they do about products where users report reactions as severe as my daughter's.

As she said when she first let me know about it, the Body Shop is very committed to not testing on animals, and to using "natural" products. Does that mean it feels its products therefore must be pure and good, and it's up to the customers to find out if there's any problems with any of them?

I'll let you know what the UK Body Shop has to say. Meanwhile, if you or anyone you know has an allergy to brazil nuts, perhaps you could alert them to the possibility of a very nasty reaction they might get if they try Body Shop Moringa Seed Oil Body Butter.

What originally inspired me to get started was eating home made ice cream as made by S, which she usually serves whenever I have Shabbos lunch there. Delicious..but the downside which held me back from having a go was her description of the amount of hand whisking she had to do to get the consistency good enough. Couldn't see myself having the time or patience for that long in action with a whisk...even an electric whisk. Plus the hassle of having to get it out of the fridge at the right time and re-beat.

Yes, well, I knew about ice cream machines, but my take on it was-- there are machines costing about £25 and machines costing £250. Seemed to stand to reason it was only the £250 jobs would do the business, otherwise why would anyone pay £250 when they could get an effective machine for £25?

But that was before the summer, when I was buying various household equipment for my about-to-be-married daughter and future son in law and Amazon were doing 25% and more off a good proportion of their kitchen machines. I started reading the customer reviews and discovered that there were a good many customers who'd bought the ">cheapo Kenwood IM200 machine and who raved about the quality of ice cream they were making. And then there was the fact that it would potentially enable me to make ice cream that was low fat and low calorie...and I could use goats' milk and cream, because my daughter's intolerant of cow's milk, but is happy to consume goats' milk products.

The obliging customer reviews also pointed me at a couple of good ice cream making books that they recommended. So I bought a Kenwood IM200 just like the one in the picture, which was sort of free given the various 25% off offers I'd acquired by buying the machines I was already going to buy, plus these two ice cream making books, which were the most highly recommended.

It was actually not until about four months after the wedding that I actually started using the machine. I started with a non dairy low cal ice cream--coconut lime ice cream, using the recipe from this book. It turned out delicious. It's easy to make--the only remotely complex bit is cooking up some sugar and water to make a syrup and then cooling it. And my daughter and my guests love it; it tastes quite rich and creamy, and you would never guess it's quite low calorie.

I think that what really got me hooked though was the discovery that making ice cream in my machine was really like getting to do alchemy. You pour this rather unimpressive looking liquid that you've put together into your switched on machine. And watch it churn it round. After ten minutes, the stuff looks a bit thicker. After twenty minutes, perhaps a bit thicker still. And then you might turn your back and after twenty five minutes, it's suddenly transformed. It's risen up to three times the size, and it's thick and substantial and---oooh-- looks just like real posh ice cream. But it tastes much, much better than anything you'll ever buy from a shop.

Since then, I've made all these flavours, in order of impressiveness (but they've all been delicious): pineapple; banana; blueberry; coffee amaretto; raspberry; strawberry, vanilla and pomegranate. And now of course my latest, which is a recipe I worked out for myself: charoses which is very impressive and recreates the heavenly taste of the charoses that I remember from my childhood. With the same deep apple/cinnamon/almond slurp plus the rich and delicious aftertaste of a good kiddush wine. If you need an explanation of what charoses (also known as haroset, charoseth and charosis) is, see here.

Yesterday, I took some coffee amaretto parev ice cream round to J., who's sitting Shiva for her lovely mother Lily, who I wrote about here. J is an absolutely ace cook and I nearly fell over when she said to the assembled multitude, "Judy makes the best ice-cream in England." Which shows that if you do a mitzvoh, you are almost certainly to get more out of it than the person you're doing it for. But I had noticed before that whenever I've had couples round to a Shabbos meal at which I serve the ice cream, the men will suddenly go very silent as they become completely absorbed in eating it. I never realised before how many men are deep ice cream addicts. And how few people have had the wonderful experience of tasting home made ice cream. Thank you, Kenwood.

Still with me? I'm still working on variants of the charoses ice cream. Because my first experimental version was done with a Ben & Jerry style recipe. I recommend the Ben & Jerry approach, which they describe very clearly and simply in their book. You make a base custard by whisking up eggs and sugar (and you can use xylitol to lower the calorie content), then adding milk and cream; then you add a syrup based on marinating your fruit or flavour sauce with lime and more sugar, and churn what you've got. Keep some chunks of fruit to add to the last couple of minutes of churning and that's it.

But you can only use that for Pesach if you're going to eat a vegetarian or fish meal, which is what I shall do for the Seder I'm doing for first night. Which just also happens to be on my 64th birthday. And my daughter and son in law will be my guests of honour. Ah, but then I have yet to make a version with goat's milk and goat's cream, but I'm pretty confident it'll be as good as the conventional cows' dairy recipe. It led to an even better discovery. My daughter's also somewhat allergic to eggs. But she told me she'd experimented with ducks' eggs, which she turns out not to be allergic to. And they're never battery produced, and they work beautifully; you'll virtually never find a duck's egg with a bloodspot. To my surprise, all the major UK supermarkets sell them, too. So I now usually use duck eggs, in preference to the very high quality free range organic blacktail hen's eggs, which are very good, but often turn out to have bloodspots.

So then I thought of my final charoses ice cream challenge. On the second night, I'm going to G's family Seder. They're going to have a meat meal. So if I want to make them some charoses ice cream to add to their meal, what can I make it with? The soya cream I usually use for parev ice cream won't do for Pesach, as it's not kosher-for-Pesach for us Ashkenazis. Ah...but how about coconut milk? Or even coconut cream? I've been inspired by looking at this site of a US based luxury coconut ice cream maker. The problem, though, is that in England you can't get kosher-le-Pesach coconut milk.

No, I'm not going to let that defeat me. I'm going to work on a dummy run for this Erev Shabbos, using ordinary coconut milk. Once I get that right, I shall make my own coconut cream from real coconuts. And Google's found me a convincing looking recipe on how to do that without gouging myself to bits trying to get the coconut flesh out of its shell. S and P are coming round for Erev Shabbos dinner, so I'll have the most discerning taste testers you can get.

As you can see, I've got the ingredients all ready.

This is some appetising looking coconut cream that I made last night from a packet of dried coconut milk. Using fresh coconut... which will have been roasted...should be that much better. I'll be interested to see how the coconut cream marries with the taste of the traditional charoset. The dairy ice version made a brilliant blend.

Key tip: most people who make Ashkenazi traditional charoses now grate the apple into shreds. It is nothing like as good as taking the trouble to use a grater fine enough to grate it into pulp. That black tool in the photo is my Microplane rotary grater, which does a good job of doing it without my grating my skin into the pulp.

Here's the recipe --enough for 4-6, which is as much as my machine will do in one batch:

Get your bowls, whisk blades and ice cream machine dasher good and cold.

In one bowl mix:
One to two organic apples (I use Gala--go for a sweet, crisp variety) grated to pulp
One half lime juice added to the apple
90gm organic caster sugar, organic agave syrup or xylitol
Ground cinnamon to taste (go easy...)
Enough ground almonds to mix and taste like it did when you were little
Enough top quality kiddush wine (King David Sacramental or Massoret, never Kedem or cheap Palwin) to absorb into the above over two to three hours in the fridge--and only then:

In a second bowl
One egg whisked in turn with:
90 gm organic caster sugar, organic agave syrup or xylitol (added a bit at a time as you whisk)
One half cup best quality (Jersey) milk (or whole fat goats' milk or coconut milk)
1 cup (250 ml) best dairy double cream (or goats' cream or coconut cream)
(Add a teaspoon vanilla extract or the seeds of a vanilla pod if using coconut milk & cream)

Stir the apple mix into the egg custard base. Check the taste to see if you need more wine or sweetening. It should be quite a bit sweeter than the charoses you remember as a child.

Set up the ice cream machine with the dasher turning. Pour in your mix and leave for 25-35 minutes or until you see it at least doubled in bulk, firm and scoopable. Scoop it out and pack into tubs and straight into your freezer.

Take out of the freezer and leave for 20 minutes in the fridge before serving.

And...I'm keen enough to have bought another identical Kenwood IM200 ice cream machine just for Pesach use. I told you I've become fanatic keen....

I'd show you a movie on YouTube of the machine doing its alchemy on one of my ice creams, but guess what? Even though I've a Master's degree in IT, I can't work out how to upload it to YouTube. The YouTube upload command doesn't seem to let me point to a file on either my Macbook or my PC. And YouTube have yet to reply to my pathetic appeal for help.

One of the pleasures of getting invited out on my friendship network of Shabbos dinners is that, not only do you get the company and the dinner, but, if you've got my level of nosiness lively curiosity, you can scan their library and their cookbook stock as well.

Last time I had one of S & P's fabulous Shabbos lunches, she had this beautiful Jewish cookbook, which a trainee she'd been mentoring had just given her as a thank you present.

I don't usually like encyclopaedia cookbooks; they're usually all about seducing you with pictures, but the recipes always end up as a disappointment. This one, though, was full of enticing sounding fish recipes that I'd never come across in Jewish recipe books before, not even in Claudia Roden's wonderful "Book of Jewish Food", which I think would be the one I would choose if I had to be dumped on a desert island with just one book.

Fish babka? A traditional Jewish dish from Ukraine, just down the road from where my maternal grandmother's family came from? How come I never heard of it? But it looked like an interesting version of fish pie without the pastry or the high fat sauces and toppings. So I made it, and...it turned out to be something quite special, much more attractive and versatile than the recipe and the photo showed.

As the recipe said, it was souffle-like. Which meant that when baked, it rose almost as much as a conventional souffle-- but stayed puffed up and impressive. The egg yolks, milk, fried onion, bits of bread and stiff egg white give it a lovely light and very tasty texture; an aerated clear yellow omlette-style base in which the embedded pieces of fish and herbs (nutmeg and dill or tarragon) are delicious, subtle and moist.

So I've experimented further with it, and worked out it would make great individual pies; the other week, I made seven for my Shabbos lunch guests, using high quality smoked salmon offcuts instead of the white fish cubes from the recipe. It was very easy, looked incredibly impressive and was even more delicious than the originals. And the pies kept beautifully in the fridge in individual plastic boxes.

This Thursday evening, I made some more with some supermarket sell-off smoked haddock, and that was very successful, though I like the smoked salmon version best. That made me two big and two small ones; the picture above is the one I had for supper on Thursday night

I've learnt that, while it's fun to just put a pile of ingredients into the breadmaker and leave it to do the whole process, the bread that comes out at the end will be very acceptable, good to eat...but nothing like the magical experience of shaping it and baking it into the beautiful objects like the rolls you can see. And choosing your own baking temperature and time means you can get a taste, a texture and a degree of crumb and crustiness that doesn't seem to come from using the bread macfhine to do the whole process.

I baked these on Friday afternoon, and I enjoyed two of them over Shabbos. My childhood challahs were always crusty, whereas even the best shop bought ones in London are always soft. But the taste of these rolls was better than I remembered my childhood ones to be, and the look of the texture was much better; thanks to a tip from one of my favourite Jewish cookery books, I'd put saffron into the water I used, and it gave the crumb a beautiful pale ivory colour, with little streaks of pale orange where the strands of saffron had been.

I'd had the breadmaker for about a month before I discovered this book which inspired me to start trying to bake challah. It's got photograph sequences of how to do the complex braidings which go to make up the most impressive challah patterns-- six braids, four braids, twelve roll clusters and the like. I put the breadmaker on the dough-only cycle, and two hours and twenty minutes later, there was a very respectable looking risen dough without any of the mess or effort that goes into making it by hand. As usual, I tried to run before I could walk and no, I couldn't follow the apparently simple instructions to do the beautiful multi-strand shape for Rosh Hashona. I should have followed the book's advice to use plasticine to work out exactly how to do the shaping before trying it out on the real thing. Still, I did produce two decent looking challohs that tasted good.

But now, I'm producing these rolls that look quite like the ones in the book. I've adapted the basic recipe in the book (16 cups of flour-- about four times the amount the breadmaker could take). I've acquired a ready cup measurer that takes care of US recipes with their how-large-is-a-cup mystery. And by buying an oven temperature gauge, I've discovered that my oven cooks slightly cooler than the temperature says, and that I get the best results from cooking at a higher temperature than the recipes say.

As for the taste: simply fabulous and very satisfying. Half a roll spread with some organic set yoghurt made a wonderful breakfast.

I tried baking bread years ago. It was always too dense, didn't taste too good, and I never felt inclined to repeat the experience. But now, I'm baking myself batches of rolls to have every day....

If you're anything like me, your heart probably sinks. Kosher chocolate does not taste as good as top notch artisan and prestige brand name chocolate. In fact, it doesn't taste good, full stop.

Elite kosher chocolate is the bog-standard Israeli, usually milk, chocolate you'll find in any kosher store, and if you're Jewish, you probably remember getting little individually wrapped pieces of it in the goody bags you either got at children's parties or put in your own kids', depending on how old you are. It is sonot...elite.

In fact, the whole world of Israeli chocolate is generally seen as a bit of a disaster area. During two years studying in Jerusalem, the one thing my daughter consistently wanted me to send her or get friends to bring her was upmarket Swiss or Belgian chocolate. Bars of Lindt, that sort of thing. You can't get decent chocolate in Israel, she would say. I was sure that wasn't true, but I faithfully sent out supplies anyway.