ETA

I have a vision of a person with a meal in front of them and instead of eating it they chuck it into a bin – and they do this every meal time. This is an ordinary person not someone afflicted with anorexia or bulimia. I say that because in our home all the food on the plate is eaten. Even if on a rare occasion someone might leave a morsel there is always a gannet at the ready to clear the plate just like Jack Sprat. Waste not want not and all that. You see apparently (and I heard it on Radio 4 so it must be true) nearly half the food in this country is simply thrown away. So if my family is eating its food; to balance things out other families are putting theirs in the bin. Okay so averages don’t quite work like that – but half of our food wasted! Puts the kibosh on worrying about food miles.

What difference does it make if your meal comes from Tooting or Timbuktu if you are going to put it in the bin. Why concentrate on the miles that food travel? Global warming? Even if you get your potatoes from your own garden its how you cook it that makes the difference – and of course how much is eaten! What if your tomatoes come from Spain and not Hertfordshire? Okay the distance travelled has an impact on global warming but so does the heating of the greenhouses in Hertfordshire. Let alone the impact of fertiliser use.

The simplest way of dealing with the production of carbon dioxide is to tax it. Tax it coming out of airplanes, tax it heating the green houses, tax the impact of fertiliser production, tax the lorry exhaust, tax the carbon dioxide caused by your cooking. Then when you cook a meal you know that its impact on global warming has been taken care of. One less thing to worry about.

And we can eat our dinner with gusto and no guilt.