Householders are to be visited by officials offering advice on cooking with leftovers, in a Government initiative to reduce the amount of food that gets thrown away. Home cooks will also be told what size portions to prepare, taught to understand “best before” dates and urged to make more use of their freezers. The door-to-door campaign, which starts tomorrow, will be funded by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), a Government agency charged with reducing household waste. The officials will be called “food champions”. However, they were dismissed last night as “food police” by critics who called the scheme an example of “excessive government nannying”.
In an initial seven-week trial, eight officials will call at 24,500 homes, dishing out advice and recipes. The officials, each of whom has received a day’s training, will paid up to £8.49 an hour, with a bonus for working on Saturdays. The pilot scheme, which will cost £30,000, could be extended nationwide if it is seen as a success. If all 25 million households in the UK were visited in the same way, 8,000 officials would be required at a cost of tens of millions of pounds. Peter Ainsworth, the shadow environment secretary, said: “You might have thought, at a time of economic hardship, that spending public money on stating the obvious is hardly a priority. With household budgets under pressure, most people are looking to spend wisely and waste less anyway.”
The UK has become a never-ending source of amusement for me.
And how many RICH folks are going to be inconvenienced??
If they showed up at my door, I would politley invite them in, the promptly shove my foot up their bum.
This sounds like a plotline from The Hollowmen.
Food Champions! How Sesame Street of them. Maybe Elmo could show up in a cape and tell them a beddy-bye story too.
When you buy food at the store, you either can buy child’s size or family sized meals to prepare. There is no adult-man-sized meal. Most processed food tastes horrible when reheated.
Take delivery pizza. All the deals are on two for one or large pizza. There is no deal for one small or one medium pie. You spend as much for those as the on sale price of a large.
There is still no need to educate people about food reheating. I don’t do it because processed food taste bad and I don’t want the same meal two days in a row.
Nothing better than this to underline the need to keep our Govt. out of Social Engineering via taxes, over-regulations and such. Also, to try and remember what gives Govt. inroads to claim such actions are appropriate (Govt. controlled health care anyone? – we pay for your health so you need to listen what to eat and how to behave…). Stop the beast while we still can.
Door to door? WTF?
If only there were a way to have information like recipes stored somewhere so that it could somehow be served up to people when they want to access it. For now we will call this device the “server”.
People could then browse through it whenever they wanted using something we will call, for lack of a better term, the “browser”
We can put a man on the moon, we should be able to solve this problem.
Good idea, bad format/implementation
Let everyone be warned… this is what happens when your leadership class becomes inbred.
Actually, we should look at the UK to the liberal future vision of America.
And small plurality (69 million out of 169 million registered) of Americans just voted to take a few steps towards that future.
I wonder if the person who wrote this story did the math. 24500 houses/8 workers = 3062.5 houses per worker. 3062.5HPW/7 weeks = 437.4 HPW per week. 437.4HPWPW/6 day work week = 72.9 houses per day per worker. 72.9HPDPW/8 hour workday = 9.11 houses per hour. 60 minutes/9.11 houses per hour = 6.58 minutes per house.
So in a little over 6-1/2 minutes these people will educate the public on all these issues?
More likely they will do a fraction of these houses if any and this will end up being just another huge waste of taxpayer money that does nothing.
Note: the above figures do not include travel time to and from the various neighborhoods nor travel time from one house to another.
This might mean that food will be scarce?
Britain has become an Ouroboros; the only action it can seem to manage is to eat, and the only thing it has to eat is itself. I expect it to disappear entirely sometime soon.
http://tinyurl.com/ouroborosEngland
#11 Yes, I think you’re right.
What a bunch of losers.
So when does Congress mandate this in the states?
This is what happens when you give government control over your individual life. Government rarely if ever scales its own power back, government by and large wants to grow until it is umable to grow any more. Then it collapses.
Welcome to the future of America, don’t worry UK, you may get their first, but we are just a few decades behind you.
So, the Government getting people to eat healthier, instead of devouring poison (which is basically what fast food is), is considered to be part of the “Nanny State”.
Yeah, that makes absolute, perfect, and undeniable sense.
We have something like that here called the Food Pyramid. It’s been around for years and years, and provides healthy eating advice. At least the old one did, the new one is garbage.
Just because the government gives advice on this sort of thing doesn’t make it “Nanny State” or fascist. Forcing it is. Advising isn’t.
“The UK has become a never-ending source of amusement for me.”
I think the Roman Empire exhibited symptoms such as this before it fell. Somebody better check for lead in their water supply.
But seriously, don’t they trust Tv, radio, and print media (or the bloomin Internet!) to help educate the UK consumer? Is this just another example of inventing work for those with relations in the government? So while the private sector jobs disappear. These made up ones get to go to those who knows somebody, or slept with somebody, in the gov. This is kin to the Global Warming job market. Gov. paid jobs based on a contrived scare. Help, save us from wasted food! Before it wipes out mankind.
The photo caption says:
“Would rather be inside pounding Big Mac’s”
Pounding Big Mac’s what?
#5, BINjamin
I gather that you must be extremely overweight…nobody reuses the scraps from a ready-meal.
The point of this story is that they are teaching people to reuse the ingredients they use to make their meals and to use less if they need less.
Why are you talking about reheating a pizza?
“eight officials will call at 24,500 homes, dishing out advice and recipes” – how could you construe that they will be telling people how to reuse the leftover sauce from a ready meal or whatever other processed ingredient is left over?
You read but clearly didn’t understand the post.
My suggestion, wipe the pizza crumbs from your eyes and learn how to master a simple understanding of the English language.
#17,
Not sure but I think it means to “pound”/”throw” them into your gut…
Pound those fuckin dirty burgers right on in there!
#19. Yes it’s American slang….apologies to our International readers.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1129964/Britain-sickest-country-Europe-worst-rates-obesity-teenage-pregnancy.html
That won’t become a problem in the USA, where fat people at the buffet line eat so much that they’ve had to implement a 10 plate minimum.