I am having trouble keeping food down, let alone using up left-overs, reading this;
DON'T THROW AWAY LEFTOVERS, WARN "FOOD POLICE"
British households will 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 started this month, is funded by the Waste and Resources Action Program (WRAP), a government agency charged with reducing household waste.
The officials will be called "food champions," however, they were dismissed as "food police" by critics who called the scheme an example of excessive government nannying:
* In an initial seven-week trial, eight officials will visit 24,500 homes, dishing out advice and recipes.
* The officials, each of whom has received a day's training, will be paid up to £8.49 (about US $11.87) an hour, with a bonus for working on Saturdays.
* The pilot scheme, will cost £30,000 (about U.S. $42,000), and could be extended nationwide if it is seen as a success.
* If all 25 million households in the United Kingdom 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."
Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TaxPayers' Alliance said: "This is a prime example of excessive government nannying, and a waste of public money and resources. In the grip of a recession, the last thing people need is someone bossing them about in their own kitchen.
"Worse still, the money for this scheme will come directly out of taxpayers' pockets, at a time when they need every penny to weather the financial storm."
Source: Jasper Copping, "Don't throw away leftovers, warn 'food police,' " Telegraph, January 10, 2009.
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6 comments:
About 6.5 minutes per household, if my back of fag packet calcs are correct for an 8 hour day 6 days a week, the food police will sure be doing a lot of nannying.
Missed that. Even the stats are BS.
Perhaps one householder has to get together 9 neighbours for their hour-long indoctrination. What joy. Collectives are so much more fun.
OK This MUST be a wind up. (Please..... let it be a wind up)
What is scary is that there are people out there who are willing and eager to do this nannying.
But then the Nazis had no difficulty recruiting concentration camp guards.
Jamie Oliver has a similar 'pass it on' recipe scheme going based on the WWII Ministry of Food. His is voluntary and at no cost to the taxpayer of course.
Certainly people need educating about cooking - and those who need it most wouldn't have leftovers cos they'd be eating takeaways 7 days a week. Volunteers are the way to go - not knocking on doors but demos in malls and supermarkets maybe.
How long before such a schene is introduced here? Anything is possible, Nanny State in NZ is alive and well right here, still.
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