We need to protect UK food quality

I QUITE agree with your front-page headline (WMN, 13 May) ‘Protect our food from low-quality imports’.

If we used our fertile land and seas to their best advantage, we would hardly need to import any food at all, except for a few popular exotic fruits and spices.

If we bothered to use all the home-grown food we waste which, for bread and green vegetables, can be as much as 50% of everything produced, family food bills would actually go down while paying farmers, fishermen, bakers and processors a far fairer price for their produce. Then, most customers would be less inclined to be as wasteful as we were, say, last summer. But at this moment, having done our best to beat this virus, it is just the time to do the same for our household economies, while the government is more interested in collecting the VAT on meals out, regardless of quality, environmental protection and welfare standards that are non-existent in, say, South America.

Despite all the books and “personality” television programmes on cooking, 50 years of laziness has left family providers more inclined to buy so-called fast food than bothering to cook and make the best use of left-overs. They could not do that when I was young because food rationing made us eat everything on our plates, or get it back at the next meal-time.

After the war, food rationing went on for a long time to save money because the nation was in so much debt to our “allies”, having saved the world from Nazi tyranny in 1940.

If we do import food, we should only do so from members of the Commonwealth who helped us then, and not from the successors of Kaizer Bill, now in charge of centralising control of the Empire of Europa.

With the combined cost of the 2008 banking crisis, which has yet to be paid for, and the cost of Covid19, perhaps we should bring back food rationing so that everyone gets a fair share, instead of the dubious benefits of “eating out” in places with fancy kitchens that waste even more food than domestic cooks.

On the telly today, a restaurant owner was moaning about not being able to make a profit if she has to maintain two metres between her diners, who can’t be bothered to cook for themselves. She should double her prices, halve her number of customers and change urban habits into special occasions and make home cooking the urban normality it used to be, before the gap between rich and poor returns to its former grotesque growth.

Tony Maskell Newton Ferrers, Devon