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Friday 25 February 2022

Allow me to rummage through your food



'Game-changer': ditch plastic packaging and best-before dates on fresh produce to combat waste, report urges

The recommendations should help to tackle food waste, plastic pollution, the climate crisis and shopping bills, food waste charity Wrap hopes.

Scrapping best-before dates and plastic packaging could prevent 14 million shopping baskets' worth of food from going to waste, a charity has recommended.

Doing so would empower consumers to buy the right amount - avoiding buying bigger packets than they need - and to judge themselves when items were still fine to eat, according to waste reduction charity Wrap.


Who could complain about being empowered apart from crusty curmudgeons? Yet we've just lumbered our way through an infection panic with lots of warnings about personal contact even through the air. Are we now about to encourage some customers to rummage through bunches of supermarket grapes with their snotty fingers?

Not that I want to put anyone off grapes and we wash ours anyway. Maybe we'll have to wash them more thoroughly in future, using gallons and gallons of water plus a drop of Domestos. Or maybe we'll avoid anything you don't peel or cook.

5 comments:

Sam Vega said...

Soft fruits like berries are going to be even more fun than grapes. Just scoop them up by the handful, and into the bottom of the basket they go (you'll have to remember to get a plastic basket rather than a wire one) and then after weighing they'll get tipped into the bottom of your "bag for life" along with the King Edwards. along with the King Edwards.

DiscoveredJoys said...

Of all the packaging available the brown paper bags for loose fruit in Morrisons are the most often unavailable. Perhaps brown paper bags are more expensive than plastic packaging, so not over-provisioned? And how does a wooden punnet compare with a plastic tray for cost and environmental impact?

Still, I am pleased to see 'bring your own container' products on sale. Usually only bulk ones with no expiration date though. And the first example I came across was 'loose' peanut butter in an early 'Green' store way back in the early seventies. It seems some breakthroughs just seep.

Scrobs. said...

The sandwich business wouldn't like that up 'em!

Lots of nice plastic there to seal in the botulinus...

James Higham said...

We need a Buy More Plastic campaign.

A K Haart said...

Sam - maybe we'll need separate supermarket trolleys for these problems. Everyone will have to push around at least two.

DJ - "It seems some breakthroughs just seep." Very good.

Scrobs - a sandwich vending machine might work.

James - and if it can be recycled, what's the problem?