Twitteretter

It seems the UK is coming to the end of its winter lockdown, with schools opening to students last week, after over two months of confinement, and restaurants and pubs able to open their outdoor facilities on the 12 th of April. I have found myself, in light of these news, as excited and looking forward to a humble pint with friends in the local pub’s beer garden as I would have been, pre-pandemic, to a two week long haul trip to an exotic location. This is an incredible moderation of expectations, a recalibration of excitement which, if able to be maintained, is doubtless a recipe for enhanced happiness in our society. If the effect is lasting, and we find equal pleasure in simple, everyday pursuits as we used to seek in expensive, once or twice a year extravaganzas, we will have a lot to thank coronavirus for, a rehabilitation of sorts, a last minute rescue from a pandemic of unsustainable consumerism and baseline boredom. Oh, man, I cannot wait for that garden pint, I hope it’s sun...

We have a problem. The Independent reveals today that top supermarkets in the UK throw away enough food to put together 190 million meals per year. This does not even account for what we, the consumers, dispose of. At the same time, 100,000 children go hungry every day and 280,000 homeless people roam the streets, again, hungry. Get your calculator out. The food discarded by the supermarkets, sent to landfill and to, as it decomposes, generate greenhouse gases, would be enough to give each of these people one and a half meals per day, all year round. We could, pretty much for free, eradicate hunger, an embarrassment to a country with the resources of the UK. The fact that we don’t, that there seems to be no willingness, by government, supermarkets or even the public, is despicable and infuriating. We, the public, can fix this, by pressurising the supermarkets to develop a system that efficiently transfers that unwanted food to those who want it. Logistics, after all, are their strength...