No Mandate Brown has urged Brrrritish families to stop wasting food to combat food shortages and save up to £420 a year in the process.
£420? Whoop-de-fucking-do. My tax bill, food bill, fuel bill, gas bill, electricity bill and just about every other bill has gone up by more than that thanks, largely, to the one-eyed jock twat himself.
He actually has the gall, the bare-faced audacity, to criticise Brrrrritish people for throwing away 4.1m tonnes (that’s 4.5m tons in English) of perfectly good food every year when fishermen are throwing fish back into the sea and farmers are allowing their fields to lie fallow or burning crops because Federal Europe will fine them the Gross Domestic Product of Albania for over-producing food that is in short supply. I swear that bloke is on another planet or so doped up he doesn’t even know what day it is.
The reason why food is in short supply – as has been pointed out many times – is a combination of the “tiger economies” (mainly China) changing form an efficient cereal-based diet to an inefficient protein-based diet and the turning over of food crops to biofuel production which is worse for the environment than fossil fuels.
Let’s look at the top 10 wasted food items:
- Potatoes
- Bread (loaf of)
- Apples
- Meat or fish meals
- Naan and tortilla-type bread
- Vegetable meals
- Pasta meals
- Bread rolls
- Rice meals
- Mixed meals
Ok, let’s look at the meals first. My guess – and I’ve not done any research other than eating the things – is that a large number of these meals are actually pretty rank. It looks nice on the picture but the recycled, dehydrated, rehydrated, reconstituted stodge you actually get in the packet is quite likely to be the work of the devil. When you do find a decent ready meal it’s usually either organic or something that hasn’t been ground to a mush in a machine and then formed into a recognisable food shape and usually lacking in artificial preservatives and the like that keep the food edible for more than two days.
Potatoes – what can you do? They usually come in big bags and if you leave them for a week in a dark cupboard they start sprouting and growing a fur coat. Sure, you can often buy loose potatoes but they usually cost more than the pre-packaged potatoes on the shelf next to them.
Apples. Well, Mrs Sane bought a bag of apples yesterday and the one I took to work was bad inside. What shall I do with them? Again, it’s pot luck whether you get a decent bag of apples or some tasteless crap that tastes like it’s been on the orchard floor for a month and urinated on by feral cats.
And don’t get me started on bread. I love bread – I’d eat sandwiches for every meal – but most of the time it’s dry and going stale before it leaves the shop. It’s a lucky day when you get bread that doesn’t break when you bend it.
The issue here isn’t two-for-one offers like the eco-terrorists claim or wanton waste like Prudence Bown says – it’s shit quality food. If decent food was sold at affordable prices then there would be less waste but people have to buy what they can afford and thanks to El Gordo and his fucking up of the economy, most people are looking to cut costs, not spend more money. Shops aren’t going to sell you food at a loss so they make it cheaper by cutting quality.
I would dearly love to have my fruit and veg delivered from the farm shop, my meat from a high street butcher and my bread from a bakery but (aside from the fact we don’t have a high street, a butcher or a baker anywhere near here) we just can’t afford to. These things come at a premium and until the Tartan Taxmen stop thieving half my income to pay for their second homes and guns for African warlords, I can’t afford it.
It’s time our lords and masters lived the same lifestyle us peasants do and learnt the value of money and experienced, first hand, the impact their fucking disasterous pie in the sky policies have on real people. When El Gordo earns an average wage, pays his own mortgage and bills and does a proper days work I’ll consider listening to his advice. Until then, he can just fuck off and die.
Technorati Tags: Gordon Brown, Food
