Victory for common sense and end to waste

As he stirs his morning cuppa, Bridgwater and West Somerset MP Ian LiddellGrainger tells Defra Secretary George Eustice of his delight at encountering the stirrings of common sense in the food industry

DEAR George, The more I look around me these days the more I detect a shortage of a particular commodity – common sense.

I don’t know how we have got to this stage but we appear to be living in a society where people are fundamentally incapable of assessing a situation, weighing up the pros and cons and taking a sensible decision.

I think this is in part, at least, down to the way codes of conduct, rules, regulations and proscriptions have become woven into nearly every aspect of our lives as closely as the woollen fibres are woven into a rug.

We are told what to do, how to do it, when to do it, why we should do it and what will happen to us if we don’t do it and end up walking around like zombies unquestioningly following orders, with the result that the facility for rational decisionmaking is rapidly being bred out of us.

Of course, when it comes to food a certain amount of control over the way we store and prepare what we eat is necessary, otherwise a sizeable chunk of the population would end up poisoning themselves on a regular basis.

But there was, at least, a whiff of sane thinking this week, I notice, with Morrisons deciding to scrap the use-by dates on its milk packaging. You may wonder, George, why I should be somewhat chuffed about this and I will tell you. It’s because the announcement represents a common-sense attitude and a step, at least in the correct direction.

I actually have a device which tells me whether or not milk is fit to drink. It came ready-fitted when I was born and it’s called a nose. I think most people have a similar piece of kit appended to the front of their faces and linked via a system of nerves to their brain. The employment of it should enable them to differentiate between milk which is fresh enough to drink and milk which smells like ripe Camembert and thus should be discarded.

Who, precisely, decides when our foodstuffs are no longer fit for consumption? Who stamps these arbitrarily sell-by dates on packaging so that if someone discovers, say, a tin of sardines at the back of the cupboard which is ostensibly two years out of date they will treat it like nuclear waste?

Hundreds of tons of perfectly good food is being chucked away every year because of rigid adherence to sell-by dates and because we are no longer encouraged to rely on the evidence of our eyes, nose and taste buds.

Indeed a cynic might say they are being kept artificially short in order

to stimulate further sales, but I couldn’t possibly comment.

Take (since it’s that season) marmalade. Buy a jar from a shop and the advice will be to consume it within a relatively short time, the inference being that if you don’t you run the risk of contracting botulism, or creeping paralysis, or insanity. Yet amateur marmalade makers will talk far into the night of the merits of the three- or four-year old vintages they are nurturing in the dark recesses of the kitchen cupboard.

According to the dairy industry this sell-by date nonsense is leading

us to pour 490 million pints of milk down the drain every year. A waste of money, a waste of farmers’ time and effort and a waste of water, since it requires roughly two billion litres of the stuff to produce that much. On the other hand while you have to use eight litres of water to achieve one litre of milk the figure for almond milk is 158 litres – another poke in the eye for the vegans. Anyway milk is but the start, George. Long live the advisory ‘best before’ date and long live common sense!

Yours ever,

Ian

Supermarket Morrisons is to scrap use-by dates on most of its milk in a bid to reduce food waste