Can’t we even slice our own potatoes now?
As M&S sells pre- cut spuds in eco-unfriendly plastic pouches...
IT TAKES just a few seconds – but peeling and cutting up a potato seems to be the latest task too far for today’s time-starved millennials.
They are turning their backs on the humble spud and buying presliced potatoes instead.
The easy spuds have appeared for the first time on shelves at M&S – which also sells pre-peeled garlic – after the store’s research showed just two per cent of shoppers wanted to prepare dinner every day.
The 700g bags of British-grown raw peeled potato cost £2 and are proving popular with younger customers, even though they could pick up a whole kilo of regular potatoes for just £1.20.
Shane Holland, UK chairman of the Slow Food movement, which promotes traditional cooking, was not impressed. He said: ‘It fits the pattern of us eating more ultraprocessed food than any other European nation.
‘More than 50 per cent of the food we eat is highly processed.
‘We now live in a world where the average UK household spends an hour a week more reading cookbooks, watching food programmes on TV and tweeting pictures of their meals than they do actually making them.
‘It’s no surprise to me that stores are selling pre-sliced potato as we increasingly treat food as a commodity to be rushed rather than taking pleasure over.’
An M& S spokesman said the reality was t hat many people wished to cook from ‘semi-scratch’, adding: ‘They prefer to spend more time relaxing or being with their family than cooking. This cuts corners and helps those people lacking in enthusiasm or experience to try to cook from scratch.’
The peeled potato slices are labelled for use as ‘crisp pie toppings, melt-in-the-mouth gratins and soft Spanish tortillas’.
They stay white in colour because they are treated with an anti-oxidant, metabisulphite, to prevent them going brown or black. But they lose some nutritional value as jacket potatoes give more fibre and potassium. And they come in plastic pouches labelled ‘not yet recycled’, which means they go into general household waste.
The controversial new M&S range comes in the wake of criticism aimed at the store for their readypeeled garlic – shipped 10,000 miles from China and packaged in throwaway plastic pots imported from Belgium.
The High Street f ood gi ant recently pledged to cut its plastic waste to zero by 2025.