The next iteration of the waste food problem

A general observation is that as modern fads and panics rotate through their second, third and fourth iterations then people start losing their minds. The original point becomes entirely forgotten and we end up with the meaningless, or even in gross error, incantation of the fashionable chant.

So it is with this about food waste, now we're onto how much bagged salad gets thrown away: 

People buying bagged salads with good intentions of eating healthily end up throwing 40per cent away.

The fragile leaves look appetising on the shelves but they have a very short shelf life and soon spoil and become soggy.

As a result, tonnes of lambs lettuce, baby spinach, wild rocket and ruby chard-duos end up in the bin.

New research suggests people throw away around 37,000 tonnes of salad every year, which is the equivalent of 178 million bags.

This is a useful example of failing Chesterton's Fence. Which is the idea that you cannot work out whether something should not exist until you have understood why it was first constructed. Noting a fence is one thing, but it is necessary to work out why the fence was constructed in the first place before it is possible to say it is no longer needed.

And so, why do we have bagged salad? Possibly because, even at these wastage rates, the loss is less than when all had to buy salad bits loose? We don't say that this is so, only that it's the relevant question to be asking.

As to the waste being worth a lot of money, no, of course it isn't. We're throwing it away so it is of no value to us. And yes, it really is true that we are the determinants of our own utility, the value of something to us is the value of something to us, not what either it should be nor what someone else thinks it should be.

But then others do manage to get to that ritual of incantation rather than doing the difficult bit of thinking:

The solution, then, it would seem, can in part come from us, the consumers. By taking personal responsibility and ensuring that we limit our consumption, we can probably dramatically reduce the colossal figure currently hanging over our bagged-salad heads.

It is indeed part of the worship of Gaia that we must reduce our consumption. Or at least acceptable ritual that we should claim to desire to do so, along with St Augustine's caveat of not quite yet perhaps. 

But there is that very proof that people aren't thinking. For of course the actual complaint here is that we're not consuming enough of this bagged salad, isn't it?

Ritual incantations rather than thinking just aren't the way to run the world.