PROJECT SMEAR!

Theresa May sparked a debate by saying she scrapes mould off jam and tucks in. Now that’s conserve-ative values says jam-maker QUENTIN LETTS, in a blast at the best-before brigade

THERESA May has at last given clinching evidence she is a proper Rightie. This, you will be glad to hear, has nothing to do with Brexit or tax-andspend policies or any of the other mind-paralysing controversies that blight politics. It’s about mouldy jam. At the Cabinet table in Downing Street this week while discussing Britain’s prolific food waste, the British prime minister announced that she has a simple solution for mould in her morning jam pot.

Does she throw away the entire shebang? No. Good vicar’s daughter and prudent woman that she is, she scrapes off the mould and gaily returns the pot to the table, telling colleagues that what’s left is ‘perfectly edible’.

How sensible. It has almost restored my faith in the old girl.

As a keen jam-maker and father of three, I am firmly in the scrape-and-keep camp. However, reaction among Mail colleagues and beyond yesterday suggests that on jam mould, as on Brexit, the PM faces much division.

This time, though, she is refusing to have anything to do with Project Fear – or Project Smear as we can call it in its jam-related form.

It amazes me that so many people have thrown up their hands in disgust at Mrs May’s jam habit. Some commentators went so far as to issue grave warnings that she was dicing with severe food poisoning.

There are food-safety professionals, particularly in America, who insist that the slightest hint of fur on jam should be treated as something akin to an outbreak of foot and mouth disease.

Put down that spoon. Walk away from the pot, sir, with your hands in the air!

They would say that, wouldn’t they? It is in the interest of food-safety professionals to make food-hygiene sound as terrifying as possible, so that we all spend more public money on… food-safety professionals.

Pish and posh to such nannyishness. Actually, I bet most nannies, who are on the whole people of great common sense, would be scrape-and-keepers like Mrs May and me.

Mould on the marmalade? There is no need to summon the mask-and-overalls brigade from the nearest chemical warfare unit. Fumigation and a period of quarantine are not essential.

Just dig down about half an inch with your trenching tool (i.e. teaspoon or knife), remove the hairified area, and flick it into the sink (or at your wife if she is pulling a face). Say nothing to the children.

Replace jam jar on table and carry on with a look of blithe innocence.

MY parents always took that approach – my late father was much gripped by domestic economy and had been brought up to treasure scarce food – and I don’t recall us ever having to be carted to hospital with raging botulism.

When my children were small, yes, there would come the occasional shriek of ‘Ew, Daddy, there’s somefink wrong with the jam’.

I would tell the child in question to pull itself together and, after removing the mould with (though I say so myself) the swift expertise of heart surgeon Professor Magdi Yacoub fixing a dodgy aorta, I would lick the spoon to show my slack-jawed audience that the jam was safe.

I am immensely proud to say that the other day I found my daughter Eveleen, now 20, cheerfully hoiking out some greenyblueish tufts in an ageing pot of my mulberry jam.

That’s ma girl, as the bulldog in Tom And Jerry might say.

It’s full of goodness, my jam: sugar, lemon juice, a knob of butter and unsquirted fruit from our garden. It would be sinful to consign such goodness to the bin just on account of a few flecks of natural mould. I do make an exception for meat. A couple of Christmases ago I noticed that our intended St Stephen’s Day beef joint had acquired a covering forest of little hairs and was now the colour of gangrene.

I had no hesitation in throwing it away at once.

But a fleck or two of mould on bread? Cut it off and give it to the birds. If a few strawberries start to look as though they need a shave, do you throw away the whole punnet? Of course not. You just remove the bad ones.

Apple with a worm waving out of one side? Chop it in half (the apple, not the worm) and chew happily on the clean half. And what is blue cheese but a large lump of mould? And usually delicious. My father loved gorgonzola so old that it stank like a Milanese sewer (and he lived to the ‘ripe’ old age of 82).

‘It’s perfectly all right,’ he would say, looking wounded as the rest of us screwed up our noses.

Mind you, there was the day we were on holiday in France and he unwrapped a Brie which promptly went running across the table. Literally running. It had turned into hundreds of maggots. Even he drew a line at that.

But this is not just about bravado, or residual wartime-rationing values, or a determination to make sure my jam is not needlessly consigned to the rubbish.

There is something more important at stake. According to figures out this week, food waste is wickedly prevalent.

The world’s population is growing fast. Food is precious. Wastefulness, quite apart from being financially profligate, is irresponsible.

Environmental campaign group, Feedback, has estimated that 80million pints of milk are dumped each year in the UK as their sell-by date has passed.

Likewise, 1.2billion crusts, worth some €71million, are discarded from loaves of bread because consumers are fussy about them. Madness!

This is the equivalent of throwing away 59million loaves a year. Think how gratefully that bread would be received by the world’s poorest countries.

Sell-by, best-before or use-by dates are supermarket stock-management wheezes that have become tools of collective neurosis. I find that milk, if kept in a fridge, lasts a week longer than the dates printed on the side of cartons.

Most butter, cheese, fruit and meat also remain ‘perfectly edible’ (as Mrs May might say) long after most suggested dates. If we took a more sceptical view we might not throw out, as we do now, 10.2million tons of good food every year. That is worth €375 a person, according to one charity.

BUT you will notice that I just used the word ‘sceptical’. And this is where things return to politics. Are you a trusting soul who believes everything you are told by officialdom? Or are you a more truculent sort who dislikes being bossed and is more likely to trust your own judgment?

I know which side I am on… and it’s not with those who come over all timid at the first sighting of mouldy jam. Now, eat up!