Why does Tesco cabbage smell like burnt plastic?
IT’S a vegetable cooking technique that has, not surprisingly, failed to set the world on fire.
But it wasn’t cooking that Tina DeMille had in mind when she set light to her 65p Tesco cabbage.
Instead, Mrs DeMille was trying to prove her suspicion that the vegetable could be made of – or could be coated in – plastic.
The 52-year-old said she became concerned when she noticed it was ‘rock hard’ and looked ‘not real’ when she began cutting it.
In a video posted on Facebook, she holds up a leaf and says: ‘What is going on with this cabbage? It looks kind of not real. It’s supposed to be a fresh cabbage, but it’s just stiff.
‘I’ve just been preparing a roast dinner for the family, and I’ve had to throw all the outer leaves into the recycling, and we’re left with just the middle. And I was just about to start cooking when I thought, hang on a minute, it looks like plastic.
‘It chopped up kind of like a normal cabbage, but I thought it just doesn’t look right. It seems too hard.
‘So I cut the middle part and put it all into water, and I thought something’s telling me this is not right. So I lit it just now, and it actually smells of plastic.’ She adds at the end of the video: ‘This is a big, big thing. Is somebody trying to kill us, or what?’
Mrs DeMille said she bought the Redmere Farms cabbage from Tesco in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, but she will be boycotting supermarkets from now on. She did not return the cabbage to the store, but instead kept it in her fridge ‘as proof’.
Jennifer Wakefield, who saw the video, said: ‘This is the second video about this I’ve seen on my Facebook this week. I firmly believe it is plastic. It’s horrific.’ Tesco was unavailable for comment.