That great economist Gordon Brown is at it again. His depth of understanding of real people and the real world is unrivalled after 11 years of prudent stewardship of the UK’s whole economic wellbeing:
Britons must stop wasting food in an effort to help combat rising living costs, Gordon Brown has said en route to the G8 summit in Japan.
Mr Brown said “unnecessary” purchases were contributing to price hikes, and urged people to plan meals in advance and store food properly.
A Cabinet Office study on food policy reveals that the average UK household throws away £8 of leftovers a week.
Back-to-front puritanism. Sounds to me like the ‘problem’ is food is so relatively cheap that Britons don’t mind wasting it. (Encouraged by bureaucratic nonsenses such as use-by dates, no doubt.) If something is genuinely expensive and hard to get, people do not throw it away.They don’t plan meals in advance and store food carefully because they can afford to live at their convenience and with less effort. We are so rich in the western world that the price of basic food and of energy has only a marginal effect on our living standards.
That’s not to say consumers and producers, unless prevented from doing so by state bullying in some unpredicted direction, won’t change their behaviour because of that marginal increase in costs. They certainly will. What they won’t do is simply less of the same thing, nor will they without threats follow the puritan agenda. The whole social and economic system will adapt in a million different ways by changes in factor prices, taste and technology.
Brown seems to think we should always be striving and suffering towards some abstract common goal, however. So the facts don’t suit.
So it is with ‘recycling’. Driven by targets and prohibitions and propaganda, it has become a national obsession. But this is at the cost of subsidy and taxation that uses up resources and displaces people from other activity. Some re-uses are enforced; others are now forbidden. It has more to do with the taboos of governmentalism than any rational allocation of resources.
There used to be quite a lot of voluntary recycling, the measure of the utility of waste reclamation being the price of the materials. Much of it has been stopped. That ‘waste’ food would have had value and been sold to pig-farmers not so long ago. Banned. On no evidence. For no other reason than it suited the bureaucracy.
Utter crap yet again from the Great Helmsman. What’s he gonna do throw a fucking tupperware party?
And by the way guy, that wasn’t Brown. That was Balls.
On the recycling thing… I get the evils for using plastic carrier bags from the staff at the local Co-op. I re-use them. They are very handy for all sorts of purposes (like the disposal of the corpses) because I’m a warden of a religious building. I have bins to line and stuff. I would like to re-use more (it knocks the hell out of recycling) and I wish there was a local milk round because you know what religious types are like for their tea and muggins here is forever doing his Grand old Duke of York act going to the corner shop to buy milk in plastic bottles.
Hell, this is semi-rural Cheshire and for whatever reason we can’t get milk delivered. Why do I think the government is in some way responsible for this. I just know that some collection of acts have made the game not worth the candle.
You would have thought the fuckers would love the idea of electrical vehicles trundling around delivering a fresh, natural product in a re-usable container to the proles but apparently not.
Gordon Brown’s idea of a slap up meal is a slice of Woolton pie and a glass of warm water. He must miss rationing like hell, but I suppose once we all have our quota of carbons it will have been reestablished in 21st century form.
I too resent the ludicrous war on carrier bags. I reuse all mine as bin liners. You have to bag up your rubbish these days, since with the end of weekly collections you will just get vermin if you don’t. The demise of carrier bags could lead to all sorts of outbreaks of disease, but that can always be blamed on global warming. Trebles all round!
Nick,
Hell, this is semi-rural Cheshire and for whatever reason we can’t get milk delivered. Why do I think the government is in some way responsible for this.
I diagnose a case of inverted collectivism. Just as some people think everything they like is or should be delivered by state action, some others assume all that’s wrong with the world is the government’s fault. It might be the government’s fault, but in this case I’d be tempted to blame the deadly forces of mass automobilisation, Tesco and refrigerators.
Once people could pick up milk from the shop get it home easily before it spoiled and store it easily in quantity, then they didn’t need it delivered every day and most were not prepared to pay the premium over bulk supermarket prices needed to support cheery whistling and clinking:
You use the Co-Op, Nick? Maybe you have no choice in rural Cheshire, but I stopped going to mine months ago. I resent standing in a three-person queue for ten minutes to pay a company I don’t like £1.50 for less than four pints of milk. The local Spar is five minutes further away but the nice Member of the Asian Community who runs it is quick and efficient, charges £1.10 for four proper pints and doesn’t glower at me for taking a plastic bag. And doesn’t have a poster of Ernesto Guevara on the wall. (Yes, really. Advertising some Cuban event at the University, I think, but still…)
Gordon Brown: what the… ?
Sam:
You are right. The last time I was in a Co-Op store I noticed that they were selling their milk in liters. Well they can fuck right off with that as far as I am concerned.
I have a personal loathing of milk. I spent possibly the worst few days of my working life (well, except for the three days at the Saudi Embassy, which was just terrifying frankly) in a milk bottling plant under the Westway. You see the world when you’re skint and doing unskilled labouring for Manpower, I can tell you.
Anyway, I haven’t been able to bear the smell of milk ever since, because the whole plant smelled of just-very-slightly-off milk and you couldn’t get the smell out of yourself or your clothes. Awful. Since then I haven’t touched the stuff, I drink tea and coffee black, even. The one good thing about it is being able to authoritatively advise middle class people that the Marks and Spencers milk comes out of the same tankers as the Kwiksave milk, there’s just a different sell-by-date on it, and watch their faces drop.
The actual job was just standing at the end of the line taking those fucking four pint bottles of and putting them in trolleys, which sounds simple enough except you had to grab them four at a time, bend down, up again, killed your back and stomach muscles. You got those crap latex gloves, but they’d tear after about 3 loads so your hands got wet and all puffed up, there was a steady attrition rate as lads had to be sent home with their hands the size of big pink soggy doors. It was like the trenches, I can tell you. The worst bit was the competition for places. If you lost the battle, you ended up at the end of the line, so when everyone else’s trolleys were full they’d bugger off and suddenly you were alone facing a torrent of bottles, and if you weren’t fast enough the line would back up and they’d have to stop it and the foreman would hit you with a bit of wood with nails in the end. Three pound an hour, three pound twenty on the night shift.
Milk. I fucking hate milk.
Ian, let us talk about gay hobbit porn instead…
You don’t want to hear about my time in the Saudi embassy packing boxes with wahhabi propaganda for distribution around the country then? Shame. Gay hobbit porn it is then…
😉
Oh, that! Yeah, sure, tell about that one! Anything other than that awful story spoiling my love for milk:-)
John K: It’s not so much the liters themselves, as the fact that two of them are significantly less than four pints. So the Co’s milk (sorry, Ian) isn’t 40p more expensive, as it appears, it’s something like 60p more for the same amount.
Ian B,
If you think it is rough taking the milk off of a bottling line and putting it on trolleys, you should try getting it out of the cows and putting it in a bulk tank. All of the bending, cows kick faster than the eye can follow, and it is that same smell who describe combined with an additional aroma. And Alisa, I can assure you that if Ian’s description makes it less appetizing for you, you certainly don’t want to hear mine. Let me just say that filtering removes the solids and pasteurizing takes care of the rest.
Ian, I don’t drink it either. Not in coffee, tea, on cereal, we don’t even have any in the house. Although I do enjoy cheese. I actually like dairy farms. I just have the same feelings for milking that you do about the bottling line. ~60 cows, 4 milkers, 2 hours, 1 me. Then clean the barn, do any chores, take a nap, and get ready to do it again. No sick days. No holidays. No weekends. No excuses.
From ‘America’s Dairyland’, this comment has been
I sense a certain degree of ‘Four Yorkshiremanism” going on here, although the anticipation of Gay Hobbit Porn will ensure I keep hitting F5 on my browser…
Well, if we’re getting into “Worst Job I ever had…” territory…
Ian B, I once had to pack wasabi propaganda at the Japanese embasy. That was no picnic either 😉
The Co-op is dreadful (and pricey) but it’s my local convenience store. And sometimes going to Tesco instead is just a drag.
OK, so we’ve concluded that buying milk at the Co-op is a grim ordeal, delivering it is an economic non-starter these days, bottling it is an awful job and milking cows isn’t fun either. Is there any section of the milk-chain that is pleasant?
OMDG, Nick! It’s not on Youtube, is it? They don’t make them like that any more…
I recommend breastfeeding.
Mid, I presume that everyone is sitting down, so here goes: I like the solids. And pasteurization takes out most of the flavor. What I do dislike very much is the smell of ‘just-very-slightly-off milk’, hence my comment to Ian. That, and I had the urge to bring up you-know-what.
You may now want to return to your regularly scheduled programming.
Ian, I’m sorry,
“An Inquiry Into The Nature And Causes Of The Wealth Of Nations” by Adam Smith, LL.D. and F.R.S. of London And Edinburgh: Formerly Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University Of Glasgow published at Edinburgh in 1776:
BOOK II. Of the Nature, Accumulation, and Employment Of Stock. CHAPTER III. Of the Accumulation of Capital, Or Of Productive and Unproductive Labour.
But though the profusion of government must, undoubtedly, have retarded the natural progress of England towards wealth and improvement, it has not been able to stop it. The annual produce of its land and labour is, undoubtedly, much greater at present than it was either at the Restoration or at the Revolution. The capital, therefore, annually employed in cultivating this land, and in maintaining this labour, must likewise be much greater. In the midst of all the exactions of government, this capital has been silently and gradually accumulated by the private frugality and good conduct of individuals, by their universal, continual, and uninterrupted effort to better their own condition. It is this effort, protected by law and allowed by liberty to exert itself in the manner that is most advantageous, which has maintained the progress of England towards opulence and improvement in almost all former times, and which, it is to be hoped, will do so in all future times. England, however, as it has never been blessed with a very parsimonious government, so parsimony has at no time been the characteristical virtue of its inhabitants. It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expense, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will.