There is remarkable agreement on the Brexit disadvantages – if not disasters – from both commerce and also the FT, who say: The UK is lagging behind the rest of the G7 in terms of trade recovery after the pandemic; business investment, seen by Johnson and Sunak as the panacea to a poor growth rate,… Read more
Category:
Food
Food: a sudden lack of willpower – or simply a commercial advantage?
An interesting article in the FT (archived by the way – so the link is certainly live – and this is the way I shall link to the FT in future – indeed have been doing for some time…) says: “People then think that being obese is their fault,” Edson [co-founder of NHS-backed weight loss… Read more
Plants may not be the panacea that they are sometimes supposed to be
At least according to the Evening Standard’s report on the recent decision by the Advertising Standards Authority. No longer, it seems, can a plant burger be automatically presumed to be better than a real one. Admittedly the ruling was largely about Tesco’s failure to properly marshall evidence that their ‘Plant Chef’ range was good for… Read more
When is the Conservative poverty handbook being published?
The Tory MP Lee Anderson has recently opined that producing a meal for 30p a head is perfectly possible. Though clearly not for him. He supports a government who spent £37 billion to manage test and trace but somehow that wasn’t enough to make it work. So having continued to support that government in relentless… Read more
NICE recommendation at last…
A welcome recommendation from NICE at last – and why doesn’t Public Health England (now surely, in a sleight of hand, ‘The UK Health Security Agency’)endorse it similarly? Maybe it will… This is the idea that your waist measurement should be less than half your height. This is a concept which has been around for… Read more
Trade in the West, China and Russia
A very interesting article here on EU and Russian trade shows that Russia is well integrated with EU trade and shows that some significant percentages of Russian trade were – actually are – with the EU (both imports and exports). In 2020, less than 2 percent of EU total exports and imports went and came… Read more
Russia sanctions are demonstrative of how the UK government has been bought
Remarkably to me, both Ikea and M&S are pulling out of Russia. Perhaps less remarkably, the following are not: Starbucks, KFC, McDonalds, Burger King, Pepsi and Coca Cola. All these are easy to avoid, but we should note that Coca Cola also owns: Schweppes, Sprite, Fanta, Vitamin Water, Lilt, Power Ade, Appletise and Dr Pepper…. Read more
Sorrows come not in single spies but in batallions
Amid the extraordinarily sad, if not, thanks to a change in American policy, entirely unexpected, news of the invasion of Ukraine, I think various points worth making. Especially as they do not seem to be widely acknowledged. Ukraine was famously, the location of Chernobyl. It has fifteen other nuclear power stations on its territory. We… Read more
It should never be veganuary in this or any other month
An excellent article by food journalist, Joanna Blythman in the (Glasgow) Herald, whose thoughts reflect my own: Johnson clearly hasn’t been in control of his weight for years. It took coronavirus to make him realise that those extra stones he’s been carrying are a marker for poor metabolic health, which predisposes you to all sorts… Read more
Global Britain? Make mine a pint – of Champagne
Brexit has thrown up all sorts of peculiar and individual desires, yet none of them seem to be of any consequence. As Der Spiegel reports, this is one of them! That is using the opportunity of Brexit to sell wine in 0.568 Litre (the equivalent of a pint) bottles, which was a recent Daily Telegraph… Read more