When my grandmother moved house, and I was given the task of clearing out her pantry, I came across a tin of raspberries that announced themselves as a “Product of Yugoslavia”. Let me be clear: by then, Yugoslavia hadn’t existed as a country for about 12 years. God knows how long this particular can of fruit had been sitting on a shelf in Shropshire.
But when I suggested that, oh I don’t know, perhaps it was past its best, the woman herself looked at me like I’d just suggested we all started using her pop socks as nunchucks.
The question of when food is past its best has, of course, rumbled on for years. The Ancient Greeks even had a joke about Diogenes washing discarded lettuce in a stream (maybe you had to be there). According to a recent article in The Telegraph, almost 10 million tons of food is wasted every year in the UK, with much of it getting discarded while still edible. And, you’ve guessed it, millennials and Gen Zs are the worst offenders; merrily chucking out carloads of perfectly edible food for no better reason than a number stamped on the packet.
Except, of course, that by far the greater crime of waste happens way before any food has even touched the shopping basket of your average 20-something scapegoat. If you’ve ever been to a farm that supplies major supermarkets, you will have seen for yourself the eye-watering mountains of delicious, nutritious produce that is discarded, rejected or simply left in the ground all because it either doesn’t fit the specific packaging demands of a particular shop (i.e. baby corn that is slightly too long for the plastic packet it’s to be sold in), or because wages to pick it are so low that nobody takes up the labour.
But I digress. Perhaps some of my generation are overly squeamish about when food is no longer “good”. I say some: use by dates and best before dates are about as relevant to my life as Fermat’s last theorem. As in, I hear that some people dedicate large parts of their attention to studying these things but, as far as I’m concerned, they’re a fart in the wind.
I will eat anything, short of it sprouting actual, sentient tentacles and climbing out of my fridge (yes, I do have a fridge). I’ll cut the mouldy bits off bread, cheese and vegetables; I’ll scrape layers of whiskery green mould off pesto, cream and jam; I’ll use sour milk in soda bread and turn bruised fruit into smoothies. But all this, I dare say, is thanks to growing up in a home where my family cooked from scratch, didn’t eat much meat and, during particularly good years, even grew the odd bit of stuff ourselves. In that environment, you learn how to trust your eye, as well as your gut, about when things are safe and when they are ready to graduate to the compost heap.
I was probably also inculcated by older generations to see so-called best before dates as little more than yet another way for supermarkets to increase the speed of their turnover and encourage overconsumption. I once watched a friend of my mother’s peel and eat an orange that was so entirely green and fluffy with mould that it looked like he was eating a tennis ball. When I tentatively asked if it was OK to eat he merely replied; “A little dry, perhaps.” That man lived into his nineties and was still regularly splitting logs and clearing ditches into his eighties.
Talking of green, it was only once I’d moved out of home and in with a group of meat-eating women in Leeds that I discovered, to my surprise, that bacon is actually pink; in my grandmother’s house, where pans of cold fat were left in the pantry for years at a time to cook in, bacon often had a Northern Lights-like sheen of turquoise, jade and emerald. But again, I never knew her to get an upset stomach.
All of which is to say that perhaps rather than pointing the finger at debt-saddled twenty somethings who cannot afford to rent anything with a decent kitchen, let alone garden, have to travel hours to work each day and are therefore forced to rely on pre-prepared or on-the-go food, we could direct our wrath at the business billionaires and supermarket shareholders who are benefiting directly from this situation.
Blame the profiteers, not the profiteroles.
Comments
Leave a Comment