Fridge Fascists

Lucy’s column for Feb 17th

They’ve riffled through our rubbish. They’ve leered into our kids’ lunch-boxes. And nagged us into eating our five-a-day portions of knobbly greens, tasteless tomatoes, bent bananas, and wilting watercress.
There are also moves afoot for busy-body council employees to turn up on our doorsteps and demand to know how many en-suites, utility rooms, extensions, and hen coops we’ve got, in order to re-value the amount of council tax we pay.
So it was only a matter of time before this Government turned us over to the food police, who are going to have the authority to knock on our doors, stick their heads in our pantries, fridges and freezers, to advise us on what to eat. And what to throw away.
So far, six councils have been given the authority to set up these calorie-counting and kitchen-bin snooping teams – each "inspector" being paid £8. 80 an hour of taxpayers’ hard-earned money for the privilege – to tell us how to use up left-overs, guide us on portion sizes, and hear this, guide us through the veritable minefield of sell-by, use-by, and best-before dates. As if we’re too thick to read the packet and end up poisoning ourselves.
How intrusive, petty, picky and pathetic is that? And what an insult to our intelligence.
We’ve already had one, very minor, run-in with the bin boffins. It so happened that, after cutting what is probably the longest garden hedge in our village – which is all very green, and organic, and natural, and saving the rain forests or whatever, with not a fence post or brick wall to interfere with nature, the environment, or the demise of the humble sparrow – himself, after piling the privet in the brown bin, picked up the scrappy bits in a carrier bag. And he, inadvertently, with no malice or aforethought, popped it on the top. Come bin-day, the chaps refused to empty the contents, and left an official note on the offending receptacle, pointing out the error of our ways. When it isn’t beyond the whit of man to just take out the miserable little bag and leave it at the side.
Friends have reported other such puerile mindedness on the part of local authority officialdom. Yet our streets continue to be littered with cans, cartons, fag packets and fast-food boxes and not one of us can remember ever seeing a street cleaner.
Those same friends are outraged at this latest edict which, believe you me, will be coming to a council near you soon. And himself is incandescent at the thought of the clip-board and pencil stub brigade darkening his very doorstep, with mutterings of : "Over my dead body." Which could well be the case, should they see the state of our freezer, which contains home-made pies of indeterminable date, and, indeed content, leading to such imponderables as whether to make gravy or custard. Not to mention cartons of what could be my imaginative soup, or last autumn’s fruit coulis, pear belle Helene, mushed-up apple windfalls.
But, you see, that’s where I think I’ll score. They can come and ferret in my freezer, poke in my pantry, delve in my dustbin, whenever they like, and I’ll tell you what: apart from a few potato peelings, soggy tea bags and satsuma skins, they’ll find nothing which couldn’t have been re-cycled by way of mincing, blending, frying, shoved in a pastry case, or just popped into a redundant ice-cream carton for a credit-crunch day. And what is beyond all that goes out for the birds, the foxes, and the neighbourhood cats.
So bring ‘em in, with their anoraks, logos, grubby notebooks, and they may learn something from somebody who’s got the food processor, the t-shirt, and knows how to blend the leftover leeks.
end