Yesterday, keen readers will recall, we had Anna Soubry sounding off about "Coffee shops" and the failings of modern day parents, both for allowing their offspring to even enter such places and for the failure to properly inculcate a firm "I shall not eat between meals" understanding in their offspring. Which however irritating is undoubtedly the accepted role of "Health Minister's" these days and probably helps raise or maintain their public profile.
Today, another Minister, not in the Department of Health, is having his public profile raised for allegedly having taken us all - but specifically "Mums" - to task for "wasting food" - the Minister in question being Environment Minister Richard Benyon.
Shadow Environment Minister Mary Creagh has launched an outraged
attack on Richard for allegedly accusing the nation's Mum's of lacking "careful fridge management capabilities" meaning that too often mealtime leftovers were being thrown away, rather than stuck in the 'fridge for consumption later.
The really funny things about this are, in no particular order (1) how little of Mary's "outrage press release" deals with the issue allegedly under discussion before morphing into the present standard Not Red Ed Labour hammer into every subject/repeat at every opportunity soundbite and (2) that no less a personage than the Mighty Ding has leapt in to defend Richard from the accusation being leveled at him ..
... the Prime Minister warned that newspaper reports about Mr Benyon's remarks might not have been correct.Any way, at least we all now know who in government holds the "'fridge management capabilities" brief, and, given the nation is failing in this area, at minimum a public awareness campaign must be on the cards ...
“Obviously, that does not look good, but what you’ve done is take a newspaper article, assume that everything in it is right and repeat it," David Cameron told BBC News.
"What happened yesterday was there was a debate in Westminster on the issue of food waste and as the minister responsible he was responsible for giving an answer on issues to do with food waste and supermarket packaging ... But, you know, it is frustrating when newspapers, you know, write things up in a way that I think is, you know, quite wrong.”
6 comments:
and politicians wonder why the public are so disengaged from them and going out and voting UKIP.
It's my food. I bought it. End of.
The biggest cause of food wastage must be "best before" dates. People now no longer check to see if food is OK to eat, using the same tried and tested techniques man has used for millenia, they simply check the best before date and if it is in the past, bin the food. It's great for supermarkets, though. Not only does it get them off the hook if someone is poisoned by eating bad food: "not us, guv, it was past it's best before date", but it also encourages people to throw away perfectly good food and then buy more.
Bayard,
Exactly.
About the only things I go with "use before" are eggs and chicken and even then, I'll go a day over. Eggs are best really fresh anyway.
Because of our glorious masters in the EU, we now have BB dates on jam, pasta and tins that are only a couple of years in the future, despite the fact that jam will last decades, if sealed properly and unopened.
Bayard : "it also encourages people to throw away perfectly good food" But saying that people are throwing away eatable food is exactly what Benyon is getting some stick for - to quote (parts of) the record of what he said :
"UK households still waste a total of £12 billion in food per year, which is about £50 a month for the average family; £6.7 billion of that total is due to food “not used in time”, which we think of as wasted by not being eaten when it could have been".
"We clarified date labelling guidance in 2011 to make labels clearer so that people are more confident about what they mean and how long food is safe to eat. My hon. Friend made the very good point that we have been needlessly throwing away enormous amounts of food when it is perfectly safe to eat it."
ps - as has been mentioned elsewhere Labour's then equivalent of Benyon, Hilary Benn said pretty much the same thing as Benyon back in 2009 ...
“As a nation we waste around £10 billion of food each year – a third of what we buy. Part of the problem is how food is labelled. Some 370,000 tonnes of food are chucked out each year after passing their ‘best before’ dates, despite being perfectly good, safe and edible. When you buy something from the supermarket it should be easy to know how long you should keep it for and how you should store it. Too many of us are throwing things away simply because we’re not sure, we’re confused by the label, or we’re just playing safe.”
They gave me a free Telegraph in the newspaper (for some reason) and this is their LEAD ARTICLE.
Which raises the question, are the T as fuckwit out of touch as benyon or is this a sublte satire to highlight what a complete and utter condescending prick he is?
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