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I’ve been known to go on about wasteful packaging (see also my original posting from 2002). Regrettably, very little seems to have changed. In fact, I’d say the situation is a whole lot worse.

So I thought it was high-time for another rant. But with another target in mind other than just Pret. This time, it’s one of the high-street supermarkets: Morrisons

But first Pret. It’d be rude not to.

Pret on Boswell Street here in Glasgow is every bit as bad. Buy a solitary baguette (Tomato and Brie, or Ham and Grieve are my favourites), and you’ll note that it comes in a paper/plastic combination “bag”. It’s open at one end, but it enables you to inspect the product before buying it (and getting your fingers all over food you don’t eat), and carry it without touching the food (perhaps useful when grubby secretaries are picking up lunch for their hygiene obsessed boss?).

Speaking personally, my hand is using a design honed over millions of years of evolution to be able to grasp things. But somehow I fear that the knuckle dragging that goes on a Pret-HQ seems to be damaging their view of the world. For all their staff seem to insist on putting my baguette into another bag. A paper one, granted, but a bag that does nothing that the bag the food is already in doesn’t already do. So I’ve pointed this fact out to the poor old PFY who seems to wind up serving me each time I go in there it already has a bag, and I suspect he’s already clocked me for a bit of a loon on the matter.

So, Pret hasn’t improved much. They continue to put already bagged products into additional bags that do a whole lot of damage to the environment. But I suspect the theme carries along the high-street. Look in the bin by your desk the next time you buy lunch out: Can of something sugary? Sandwich bag/box? Empty packet of crisps? Perhaps an apple core? Oh, and the bag everything came in that you didn’t need because you can’t carry a few items in your hands “comfortably”. Feel good about the biodegradable apple-core until you realise it’ll go in a landfill surrounded by bags, not least the bag that’s lining the bin it and the other rubbish is in, AND the bag that the bag containing the other bags gets put in to by the cleaners. Lots of dead dinosaurs involved.

So who is this other mystery culprit? Well, it’s Morrisons. We end up shopping there a fair bit as it’s close to Frances’ parents. They also have good recycling facilities, and as our close (read “block of flats”) doesn’t have anything going for it we go there. There’s a particularly bad habit that Morrison’s in-particular are guilty of, which is packaging perfectly good produce in bags for no good reason.

Buy a “value pack” of sweet peppers, and you’ll get three peppers (one green, one red, one yellow), covered in thick plastic. The sort of plastic that “industrial” gets prefixed to in a lot of situations. But that’s not the worst example. Not by a long shot.

The worst situation is individual peppers, the sort you normally put into a (plastic) bag and buy by weight. Morrisons individually wrap peppers in plastic, and individually price them. So we needed a few more peppers this week (we’re “going veggie” for a week, more on that later this week), and five peppers (a three pack and two green ones) meant three separate plastic wrappers.

And don’t get me started on the Swede! Oh, you did. Well, in that case… A swede (turnip up here, but that’s just complicating matters). Naturally covered in a thick “rind” of sorts. Morrison’s see fit to encase them in plastic too. For no reason other than they want to stick a bloody individually priced label. You’d think “ah, maybe they don’t want to weight things all the time”. Well, they weigh the mushrooms in bags. At least, they are doing so now. Individually wrapped Mushrooms might seem like a laughing matter, but I fear it’s only a matter of time. They’ve started doing broccoli spears already…

Well, it’s a bloody annoying thing to look at the amount of plastic we throw away simply when we unpack our shopping all because some manager high up in Morrisons thinks that’s what people want. All those dead dinosaurs pressed (literally) into action as food wrapping. And we still wash our veg anyway, to get rid of the pesticides and goodness knows what else. Probably all the plastic residue left over.

You’d think - what with all the packaging going on - people forget that vegetables grow in soil. Personally I’ve shovelled a fair amount of horse and cow shit into vegetable patches ahead of planting, to know what it takes to get good quality veg over the years, and I hate to see this “productisation” going on of our vegetables.

Well, it makes me all the more determined to try and get out of the habit of shopping in super-markets and find a decent green-grocers that puts produce on display so you can prod and feel the quality (or lack thereof). If only the one at Glasgow Farmers market didn’t sell out of produce so quickly (get there before 11am if you hope to buy something more than cabbage). But given the atrocious over-packaging of food going on in the supermarkets, it’s no wonder he sells out of everything so quickly…

One final (non-ranty) word. If you’re concerned about the quality of food we see in supermarkets, you’d be well to watch supermarket secrets on Channel 4. It might not go over anything much new that anybody concerned about food quality didn’t already known, but it’s informative and interesting none the less.