Bert Kwouk was born in Warrington. Although a slap to wiki for describing Warrington as being in Lancashire…
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I rather suspect those stats in the Times have been somewhat mis reported. The hospital at the centre of the study is a specialist eye and ear hospital. I reckon it should read, of those reporting loss of sight, 8.9% were both type2, obese and on semi glutide. Slightly different to 8.9% of obese type 2s on semi glutide develop sight loss.
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True. I fear, worse still, that if the calories are reduced it will be the brown rice, wholemeal bread and fresh potatoes which go and all of the above which stay.
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You’ve pretty much described the diet of a XXXXL type-2 friend of ours 
The #1 source of plastic pollution globally is packaging. We all see overpackaging every day - e.g. a crisp bag the size of a duvet cover with six forlorn little crisps far away in one corner, &c…
Though much is said about the persistence of plastics, it’s hard to grasp, especially if you’ve ever watched something you actually want fade and crumble over a matter of weeks when exposed to sunlight! It’s easy to imagine all plastics break-down to nothing in a matter of months or a few years.
Surfers Against Sewage posted the image below today after a recent beach clearance:
Look carefully for the price on the first pic.
Britain decimalised in 1971 - fifty three years ago!
Overpackaging of foodstuffs really should be a very high priority for change.
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My local council will collect and recycle ‘hard’ plastics - HD polyxxylenes, PMMA, PET etc - but not ‘soft’ ones. The nearby Sainsburys offers to recycle plastic bags. I imagine they really mean LD polythene. But they get all my soft plastic wraps back, since that’s where most of them come from.
I don’t know how the impact budget works. Since I collect the bags until I have enough and since I don’t want a stinking heap of plastic in the kitchen I give them a cursory wash. That involves hot water and a little detergent. Does the energy needed to heat the water and make the detergent offset any benefit gained by keeping plastics out of my landfill ? Do Sainsburys just dump everything that isn’t LDPE into landfill anyway or, worse still, ship it to some third-world recycling centre where it can sadly ‘go astray’ (into the ocean) ?
As a minimum I might hope that, if I were prepared to separate it out, the waste people could at least dump all the soft plastic in one place. It would be easier to manage there and to find again when the time comes that we can recycle it.
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We also have a fairly comprehensive recycling scheme, but same as you, not for flexi stuff, which in the absence of convenient alternatives, goes to landfill. Landfill is kinda least-worst, since at least in the UK there are still standards applied to prevent leaching and erosion. When all the oil is gone, generations from now, those ancient dumps will become important hydrocarbon quarries - mined for all the stuff we wasted…
Even the best recycling is worse than simply using a LOT less plastic - and despite unceasing, but token, efforts, there are still stupid amounts of packaging materials with a lot of products. This has to stop.
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You’ll know better than I do that the food manufacturers say the trade-off is using plastic versus wasting food and/or limiting the availability of certain sorts outside cities/towns large enough to sustain, say, a high-street fishmonger and butcher.
I made the BBC Good Food Easy Meat Loaf last week. It calls for prosciutto. Sainsburys have it, but each slice is separated from the next one by its own piece of plastic as well as the whole lot being encased in plastic. Maybe I should ask my town’s one remaining butcher how thinly he can slice dry-cured ham, assuming he has a dry-cured ham in ?
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"Should we all eat wafer thin ham, Barbara?"
You’re asking the wrong person (especially if you think I’m being played by Felicity Kendal ). When it comes to recipes I do what I’m told 
.
EDIT: Oops, wrong TV comedy Barbara, it seems …
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The Good Life and The Royle Family, both absolute classics!
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GARGANTUAN amounts of food go to waste anyway - and absurdly short use-by-dates play their parts - but when you see what goes to waste in the growing and manufacturing stages it would make you cry…
Well, being a local boy you’ve probably seen how much gets left in the fields, for a start…
I’ve seen literal tonnes of dessert ingredients go into the slop bins because part of the line was marginally undersizing the decorative dollops on top… and that’s not a rare or isolated incident.
Biggest offender in all of this are supermarkets and the insanely unrealistic standards they set.
All our soft plastics go to Tesco recycling. We have barely anythimg to go in the black bag.
Who send it to Poland before some of it is forwarded to another country, Turkey for example. What happens to it after that is anybody’s guess.
So it travels maybe 2,000 miles and ends up “somewhere” Green indeed 
I’m not knocking your efforts but Tesco are, at best, just passing the buck.
Lol, I hope it’s a recyclable one
Seriously, it is the amount of plastic used in packaging (often completely unnecessary) that is the problem. Until that is rectified any attempt to recycle it is just a sticking plaster on the real issue.
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I know very little about the chain upstream of the supermarkets. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there was a good deal of wastage there. As I understand it the recently announced plan from the king is to try to intercept wasted produce at that stage and get it into the hands of food charities like Fareshare and SOFEA (where I volunteer) so that it gets eaten rather than dumped. That said, on my Monday morning shift I can’t say I’m seeing any significant inflow as a result of this scheme yet. To be fair, Charles has cancer so he may well not have the time or energy to propel this forward as planned.
I have to say that since the pandemic the supply of surplus food from within the supermarket distribution system i.e. once the supermarket have taken delivery of it, has all but dried up. I can’t be certain that Fareshare aren’t partially involved there - they decide to a large extent which customer-facing charity (like us) gets what from the supermarket surplus. But I hear that the distribution centres are now ‘wasting’ a lot less than they used to and I see a lot more spaces on my local supermarket shelves which, I assume, means ‘supermarket central’ isn’t over-ordering and then dumping the surplus to nearly the extent that it once did.
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A few years ago, when Sam worked in Desserts, surplus like product trial runs, and off-spec batches that would have been rejected by supermarkets were being given to outfits like Fareshare - but that was pre-pandemic.
Since the pandemic, and more importantly, since the issues with inflation, energy costs, &c &c, product quality standards have been reduced by all supermarkets (as have sizes!), so manufacturers meet standards more easily, keeping everyone’s costs down.
Good news for food waste, bad news for food banks. (And bad news for human health [more sugar, salt, fillers, hydrogenated fats, &c in foods], and bad news for the environment [more palm oil and suchlike]).
Where Sam works now gives premium grade only to the food banks, but of course there is altogether less enthusiasm for fresh veg than cheesecakes! 
Cheap, wonky veg. What’s not to like? It all looks (and tastes) the same once you’ve chopped it anyway. Why are so many people even bothered by this bollocks?
Stop cramming the food with shit, and many people won’t give a flying fuck if it’s got 5% less sauce than the specs say it should.
This really boils my piss. My boiling piss is free, as there is no specified recipe for it, and it’s always been wonky. In any case, all piss is the same once it has soaked into your gusset. I understand, of course, that this is a somewhat ill-advised metaphor for food production, but fuck it. You’d probably be better off sucking stale piss off your own gusset than eating some of the processed poison on the market these days.
Probably.
Hey, this wonky potato looks just like my chalfonts.
We’re all doomed.
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I largely agree. By using a butcher, baker, greengrocer, etc, and avoiding supermarkets as much as possible you reduce packaging waste.
True. But you burn a lot of petrol.
My town (well north of 35,000 people by now) has no fishmonger or greengrocer or, I think, bricks-and-mortar-shop baker and only one butcher, and he doesn’t routinely have, for example, lamb shanks in stock.
I can find one or two of the above in the next town along (Abingdon) but if I want a plastic-free shop I probably have to drive to Oxford (or take the bus or train if the return load won’t be too heavy).
To be fair on Sainsburys, they stock a lot of loose fruit & veg.
We do this
They deliver overnight to avoid London traffic.
Each week you get a leaflet explaining where each item comes from and why you’re getting it. Sure, there’s “too small”, “too odd”, but the great bulk of it is always “too many”.
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