Waste not, want not should be our rule, like in the old days

By Mike Lowson

Published:

THIS week, I have spent some considerable time in fascinated and yet slightly horrified amusement as I struggled in vain to unravel one of life’s most puzzling mysteries which, over the years, most of us have come to accept without question.

The mind-bending conundrum that took up my all-too-short lunch break one day was this: what exactly is the purpose of a corner yoghurt? Many brow-furrowing days later, I am still wondering. Frankly, I am none the wiser.

If you have never consumed one of these convenient comestibles, here’s a brief explanation. They’re a fruit-flavoured concoction that comes with the syrup in a separate compartment from the yoghurt in the main pot. This means you can choose to eat the yoghurt raw and ignore the fruit; tip the fruit corner into the yoghurt and mix it into a gooey mess, or take alternate spoonfuls of each. Whoop-de-doo.

As I sat there wishing I had ignored all dietary advice and had opted instead for pie, chips, beans and mash with a side order of bread and butter, I couldn’t work it out. Surely if you wanted strawberry-flavoured yoghurt you would buy one with the fruit mixed in? If you didn’t want any fruit, surely you would buy a plain yoghurt instead? And why would anyone want to eat it in alternate spoonfuls. That’s just weird.

I concluded that the twin-pot corner was simply a marketing ploy to lure us into eating even more than the 100million pots of yoghurt we buy in Britain each week. Let’s face it, who’d choose to eat yoghurt unless it was packaged attractively? Much as I have tried to like it, I still think it tastes like crushed daisies with a dash of wallpaper paste mixed in milk that has been sitting on a sunny doorstep for hours.

Later in the week, however, I read a report from recycling consultants Waste Resources Action Programme that revealed we throw away more than 1.3million unopened yoghurts in the UK every day. How many of them are of the corner variety is not revealed. A lot, I venture to suggest.

Daily we also throw away 5.1million potatoes, 1.2million sausages, 4.4million apples, 1million slices of ham and 7million slices of bread. The report says that we chuck out almost a third of everything we buy, in fact. That amounts to £420 a year for the average UK household, or £610 for those with children. Just think how many more corner yoghurts that could buy if you were so inclined. Which I am not.

The saddest thing about reading the report, however, was that I wasn’t surprised. It is something I have been banging on about for many years and now, with the publication of this fascinating study, I hope the time has come for action.

Leaving aside the disgusting wastage by affluent westerners when much of the world is facing a food supply crisis, it makes no sense for us to waste our cash in this way. It is one of the unacceptable aspects of the pre-packaged society in which we live.

Let’s face it, when did you last go to a supermarket and buy just the flavour of crisps you like? It is irresistibly tempting to buy a “value pack” containing salt and vinegar, ready salted, cheese and onion, and polecat flavours, even although you know full well that the polecat-flavoured bags will be left untouched in the cupboard until they burst and go soggy. Every value pack has one flavour somebody in the family doesn’t like.

It is the same with yoghurts. Those that come in packs of four – fresh strawberry, tangy raspberry, wild blackberry and crushed cowpat flavour – will always see at least one of them, usually the wild blackberry, end up in the bin unopened.

That wasn’t the case a generation ago, of course. When we went shopping back then, we bought what we needed – no more, no less. The grocer weighed out the potatoes we wanted, rather than us buying a massive supermarket bag that will never be finished before the contents sprout and go mouldy.

From the butcher, we could buy two, three, six or nine sausages if we wanted, not just the eight or 16 that the supermarkets offer because that is how they are packaged. The boiled ham we bought was sold by the slice, cut on the premises, not in an impenetrable package that guarantees some will be discarded uneaten.

The waste report should be a wake-up call to us all to pay much closer attention to what goes into our shopping bags, for the sake of our health and our finances.

Our modern-day consumer society with its pre-packaged, tasteless, sterilised, manufactured food should be ashamed of itself. Let’s get back instead to local shops, limited packaging, seasonal local vegetables – don’t start me on that one or we’ll be here all day – and eating only what we really need.

It’s a dream, I know, but better surely than the daily nightmare of trying to fathom out whether or not the world really does need a corner yoghurt.

Finally to my heroes of the week and, at a time when the contents of my shopping basket are under scrutiny, it is a delight to pay tribute to some of the top food producers in the north and north-east who triumphed at the Scotland Food and Drink Excellence Awards in Edinburgh.

Pick of the bunch was pioneering strawberry and raspberry grower Angus Soft Fruit, from Arbroath, which won the supreme award for its pesticide-free Good Natured Fruit range. A tasty success.

Among others celebrating were Wick-based co-operative North Highland Products, whose Mey Selections brand won two awards, as did shortbread manufacturer Deans of Huntly.

Fraserburgh’s James Watt and Martin Dickie also scooped an award for their Paradox Imperial Stout from their BrewDog brewery.

Although the Scottish diet is an international joke at times, we actually produce some of the best food anywhere in the world, I reckon, so we should be proud of it and buy as much of it as we can. Grow local, buy local, eat local, I say.

And don’t spoil those scrummy Angus strawberries by drowning them in yoghurt, corner or otherwise. Please.