Geriatric OE

The weekly musing of a couple of Kiwis on their geriatric OE in The UK






Monday 30 January 2012

more food for thought...


Monday  30 January 2012
A very chilly start to this morning, just 1 degree outside when we left for our walk down to the station. No frost on the ground though. I forgot  to take my gloves with me when went for a walk at lunch time and boy were my hands cold. 

There was a programme on tonight called Ration Book Britain. It was about the affect severe food shortages that Britain faced during the war, and right up until 1954. I Didn’t know until I saw the programme that ration books were still being used up until then. I cannot imagine how hard it was to feed a growing family, let alone clothe them on the meagre portion allocated to each family member.  Despite the sever austerity measures, according to the programme, after the war British children were healthier and grew taller after the war than before. 

It really made me think about how lucky we re to be able to wander down to the supermarket and just about buy whatever we want whenever we want. It also made me think about how careless we are as a society about food wastage.  The supermarket labels the fruit and veg with sell by dates. Why cannot they simply just look at the produce and weed out the ones that are no longer fresh. Supermarkets aren’t the only ones. In a golden arches store the other day the people at the table next to us left almost a whole burger uneaten, which was of course thrown away. Surely when they offered it they knew they wouldn’t be able to eat it all. Is it a case of as Mum used to say that their eyes were bigger than their stomach or was it pure greed? The same is true when we go to the movies and see people coming in with huge boxes of popcorn and giant sized cups of coke. Apart from the fact that when we leave it looks like most of the popcorn winds up on the floor I think about the amount of sugar they are consuming in the coke. No wonder we are in the midst of a diabetic epidemic.

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