Posted on 04/19/2008 5:14:51 PM PDT by proxy_user
A sinister government agency called Wrap (We Rape and Pillage) has spent vast lumps of our money to determine that, in Britain alone, we throw away 5.1m potatoes every day. Apparently this is so morally reprehensible that we should all commit suicide.
Hmm. So we have one part of the government telling us that if we continue to eat too much we will become fat and everyone will explode. And now we have another part telling us that we have to finish everything on our plates because it’s wrong to throw food away.
Is it though? Of course, eco-mentalists argue that rotting food gives off methane gas – a global-warming agent 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. So a potato, casually discarded because you had too many biscuits with your afternoon tea, will cause every polar bear to suffer an agonising death, crying for its mother and thrashing about in boiling seas.
Yes, an unused maris piper will kill the planet more quickly than a Chinese power station.
Funny that, because when I suggested recently that cow farts were creating more global warming than a flock of Range Rovers, environmentalists were quick to point out that methane breaks down so quickly it isn’t really an issue. Now, apparently, it is.
Except, of course, it isn’t – because if you leave a potato in the ground it will rot. If you dig it up then throw it away the council will put it in a landfill site. Where it will rot. And if you eat it, it will come out of your bottom, go to a sewage works and end up in the ground. Where it will rot.
In other words the only way you can prevent a spud from turning into a huge poisonous cloud of suffocating gas is to call the US air force and ask it to carpet bomb the potato-growing flatlands of Lincolnshire with Agent Orange. Who knows? Maybe this is why the government recently announced a proposal to abandon Norfolk to the sea. As payback for the county’s farmers, whose produce is primarily responsible for the sea’s tempestuousness in the first place.
Of course if we ignore the environmentalists – and we should – an army of fair-trade lobbyists then ride into the argument, claiming that all the food we don’t eat could be shipped to, oh, I don’t know – Biafra. I give them the same argument that I gave to my mother at meal times 40 years ago. “How? In an envelope?”
In some ways, however, I’d quite like to see unwanted food being loaded on to ships by fair-trade enthusiasts. It would set them against the ecoists, who’d argue that the journey would kill some polar bears. There’d be fighting on the docks. It’d be a hippie bloodbath.
Frankly everyone seems to have forgotten one simple thing. If I choose to buy a bag of potatoes, and then I choose not to eat them for some reason, that is my lookout. It is my money that I’m wasting, not George Monbiot’s.
And similarly it’s no good pointing a finger at supermarkets, saying that they throw perfectly good food in the bin every day. Yes, though that’s because they are forced to put “best before” dates on everything to avoid being prosecuted by the government for giving some fat kid a bit of wind.
I agree. They should be made to keep every vegetable until it starts to look like a Doctor Who special effect. But then what should they do? Many Africans are desperate, but not so desperate that they’ll eat food which has mutated into an enormous bogey. So it goes into the ground. Where – guess what? It’ll rot.
The best solution then is to worry about something more important – but sadly we are ruled by a government that will never pass up the opportunity for a bit more interference. If it could have an agent in every house, at every meal time, ready to prosecute parents for using too much salt and not making Johnny eat up his greens, trust me on this: it would.
Unfortunately, however, the civil service is too busy counting discarded potatoes for that – so instead our glorious leaders have decided to make the whole process of waste disposal so bloody complicated that you would rather eat everything on your plate, and consequently explode, than go to all the bother of remembering which bin to use.
Round where I live we have green boxes for newspapers, plain white paper and green bottles. But not bottle tops. They have to go in the blue box, along with the shampoo, the junk mail and the paper that isn’t quite white.
And it gets worse because there’s also a garden-waste bag into which you may put hedge clippings, but not food waste. What you’re supposed to do if you’ve eaten half your hedge, which technically makes the other half food waste, I don’t know. Happily, though, the council will provide a “field officer” – called Standartenführer Schmidt, probably – who’ll call round with advice and leaflets, which when you’ve finished reading them should go in the blue bin. Or is it the green one? Honestly, you need to be Mr Memory Man to stand a chance.
What I do to get round this problem is to feed all our waste – even the junk mail, the hypodermic needles and the peelings from the potatoes – to our chickens. It’s brilliant. The eggs they produce have actually started to come out in old HP Sauce bottles, which is handy. And I don’t have to tip the hens at Christmas.
If you have no chickens, don’t despair. You can either wait for the government’s exciting Compost Awareness Week, which starts on May 4. Or you can live entirely on bars of Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut chocolate. Because no one in recorded history has ever thrown one away.
Smaller portions seems a simple solution.
Get McQueen and Garner to show the Blokes how to make ethanol out of potatoEs, LOL.
Tuber or not tuber, that is...
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