Inglorious food

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The French Super Market Bon Marche has a new campaign going to sell fruit and veg that doesn’t meet the usual aesthetic qualities people expect from super markets. This is to help combat food waste, and allows them to sell the food 30% cheaper (and I’m sure is absolutely not a marketing gimmick). There’s even the required YouTube video about how successful this campaign has been going around:

One interesting thing from the video other than that people will quite happily buy the inglorious food is that , which is obviously going well as first I’ve heard about it. The European Commission tells us that:

“About 90 million tonnes of food is wasted annually in Europe – agricultural food waste and fish discards not included.

About a third of the food for human consumption is wasted globally – around 1.3 billion tons per year, according to FAO;

Food waste in industrialized countries is as high as in developing countries:

—In developing countries, over 40% of food losses happen after harvest and during processing;
—In industrialised countries, over 40% occurs at retail and consumer level.

Food is wasted throughout the whole food chain – from farmers to consumers – and for various reasons.”

So what could those “various reasons” possibly be (I’ll give you a hint Straight Bananas). Why yes it’s our friends in the European Commission (with a bit of help from hte U.N.) and EU Regulation 543/2011. Now at first glance one might think that ensuring that produce is “sound, fair and of marketable quality” quite reasonable, but as ever with the EU it’s a bit gold plated. From the UK Government guidelines for complying with this regulation:

“These products covered by the specifi c marketing standards need to be graded according to their quality.
There are two commonly used quality classes: Class I and Class II. There is also an Extra Class for all specific marketing standard products, except for lettuces. These three classes can be summarised as:

  • Extra Class:
    Superior quality produce, that is uniformly regular in shape and appearance, only allowing some very slight superficial defects.
  • Class I: Good quality produce, allowing for minor defects such as areas of slight skin defects or slight shape defects.
  • Class II: Reasonably good quality produce, which may show one or more defects (depending on the product), such as slight bruising, damage or colour defects

If it doesn’t fall into one of those categories you can only sell it for “home processing”. So in Class II you’re allowed some defects but that still excludes a lot of perfectly good food. Here’s an example:
Carrots must not be forked and free of secondary roots. Oh and depending how you read it naturally purple carrots are prohibited entirely.
The regulations for apples are even sillier given some heritage varieties (though no doubt there are exemptions).

It’s a reasonable accusation that the super markets have been over cautious and have sold us an image of perfect food. However given the volume of regulation on all the different fruit and veg they sell and the penalties for non-conformance you can understand why they might be a bit cautious. Even allowing for that though, if the EU wants to reduce food they might look at actually allowing shops to sell food that doesn’t comply to some committee produced ideal.

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Unspeakable – Laurie Penny

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Unspeakable ThingsThis isn’t about Ms.Penny’s latest tome, nor am I going to comment about someone who has protested Amazon having legal tax set ups selling their wares via the same company *. Rather I’ve found the whole Amazon review situation and the responses to it rather illuminating on some world views.

It all started when Old Holborn tweeted ‘Let the trolling commence’ with a link to the Amazon review for “Unspeakable things”. This was interpreted in some quarters as Old Holborn instructing his followers to go and troll the reviews, and who knows maybe some people do do what OH tells them – could just as well be an observation as to what would happen. Either way it seems that within a day there were 20 “nasty” reviews ” full of vile sexist and scatological language”. Having read all of the reviews I can but assume that some of these reviews have been removed. Any which way Ms Penny wrote about this terrible state of affairs and asked her followers to write nice reviews and down vote the bad reviews. This call to positively astro-turf the amazon reviews in response to the “call to trolling” was shared over social media, and this is where it gets interesting.
We have two unevenly matched protagonists:

In the red corner Ms Penny with her many followers, access to the legacy media and a publishing house

In the other corner Old Holborn with his “many” followers a blog and a twitter account and of course an army of sexists

So obviously a fair fight. Let’s head over to the Amazon reviews to rejoin the action.

We rejoin the action with the 5 star reviews leading over the 1 star reviews by 99 to 76 (accurate at time of going to press).

Looking at the down/up voting of reviews this when carried out as part of a campaign is quite a good way of hiding and stifling opinions. In the team Penny reviews several of them mention that there is an “organised campaign” to provide bad reviews, but a review which pointed out that Ms. Penny had called for a similar campaign seems to have finished and was chastised for not being a review of the book – unlike the “reviews” saying “ignore the 1 star reviews they’re trolls”.
Personally if I was looking at a review of a product I’d be very interested to know that there was an organised campaign of reviewing on both sides of the fence.

The next obvious nonsense amongst these reviews are all the accusations that the negative reviews haven’t read the book. However of the 99 positive reviews 76 of them are for the as yet unreleased (on Amazon) paper back version (compared to 65 of 76), plus several actually state they haven’t read the book but are just rating as a response to the negative votes or in expectation of how good it will be. So again team Penny would seem to be indulging in the very practice they accuse others of, I’ve found very few verified purchase reviews on the team Penny side. I’ve found none on negative side though they aren’t complaining that such reviews don’t exist.

The last complaint team Penny frequently make is the number of negative reviews made by people who haven’t reviewed things before well negative reviews 39 of 76 have reviewed things before compared to team Penny on 43 out of 99 so again pretty much level pegging on that.

All of which is only so interesting from a how these things work point of view, and provides yet another needless demonstration that people are great fans of applying different standards and rule to their own side compared to others. Not exactly news that.

Some of the 1 star reviews are very poor but in the tradition of amazon reviews there are also some real gems.

Enough with the numbers though having spent the effort in actually reading the comments made to all of the reviews (yeah I do really need to get a life, but it was a very dull conference call), the recurring themes from team Penny were:
1) If you don’t like it why did you review it?
2) If you don’t agree with it why did you read it?
3) If the review is bad it must be a troll/misogynist back lash

Now as they’ve been told that there’s an organised campaign of sexist trolling by people who hate Ms Penny for being young female and left wing, it’s understandable that they’re looking for that. However even the quite erudite reviews that to me seem to be addressing the book directly and seemingly from an informed point of view get the same accusations – I guess just a defensive response.

The first two points though really puzzle me, why wouldn’t you provide a negative review to something you genuinely found to be not good? IF only positive reviews were allowed then we may as well not bother with reviews but just have the publisher provide a marketing blurb and leave it at that. The second recurring point of “if you don’t agree with it why read it” I find though both the most informative and worrying. Team Penny by their own words seem to dwell in a cosy political echo chamber with no desire to see a different point of view, and worse they can’t comprehend that other people might want to expose themselves to other points of view.

The down voting and telling people who disagree with the book to not read it and to keep quite – from my point of view presents a clear demonstration of how people from Ms Penny’s area of the political world approach thinks. They don’t want to convert people to their ideas, or discuss the subject matter – rather if you don’t agree with them then you’re a lost cause, less then them and should shut up and if necessary be forced into silence.

As we’ve seen many times before with the no-platform approach and other campaigns it would seem that young millennial left-wingers (at least) are no fans of free speech. Nor oddly have they managed to learn one of the oldest rules of the internet ignore trolls and they go away, shouting about them only encourages them – then again perhaps Ms Penny is well aware that there’s no such thing as bad publicity and a good old fashioned bust up makes for great publicity. I would suspect that her target audience probably aren’t going to be affected too much by the Amazon reviews.

As I observed before not really anything new here, but nice to have these things demonstrated so clearly from time to time. Besides which it amused me no end. If I can find the time and a suitable right wing male book I might compare how they fared by comparison.

* Well apart from that comment of course.

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When equalities collide

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It’s all too easy to mock comment pieces over on the Gruniad’s comments make free – but I’ve never been afraid of going for easy targets and this recent piece just amused me too much.

Jane Fae is it seems convinced that “an unstoppable impulse is about to sweep away traditional ideas of gender – and we’ll all benefit”. It’s nice to see that they’ve noticed that the marriage equality bill didn’t bring equality as quite a few people observed at the time, though not from quite such a narrow perspective as Ms Fae is concerned about.

However enough of that the two things that really amused me where the following pronouncements:

“We will fight them and I expect we will win most of them, because in the end, not to allow us to win is simply cruel.”

Now there are many arguments to be made as to why any given social change should come about but that it would be cruel to not let a minority get what they want isn’t the most convincing I’ve ever come across. Without a bit more detail as to just what it is they’re being denied that is so cruel this argument could really be extended to any social change you like. Also historically the precedent for societal change on the basis of the minority thinking it cruel isn’t that good.

The gem of Ms Fae’s piece though is this:

“one of the first things you are likely to be asked by a prospective employer or government department is “what is your gender?”
Why? In a society where gender is allegedly no longer an issue, whose business is it of anyone but the individual concerned and those closest to them? “

Now I actually utterly agree with Ms Fae whose business is it what gender someone is or how they identify. But firms have to ask that question because the “equality” agenda so long championed by the Gruniad and the likes of Ms Fae has demanded that any aspect of life they’ve set their sights on must not only be equal but must prove it’s meeting the standards of equality that they demand. So how do prospective employers make sure they won’t come under fire from the “equality” police for not being equal enough, why by asking that very question Ms Fae objects to and recording it. Once upon a time they didn’t bother, they just (in the large) tried to hire the best candidates, which is surely what equality would be about, but because there some employers preferred one sex over another (and many womens only businesses still do) the equality enforcers demanded that the employers be able to proof that they were conducting their business in an approved of fashion – so they had to start asking about gender and race and all sorts of other things to make sure they were suitably diverse. So Ms Fae if you want such irrelevant questions to stop being asked I suggest you might want to start campaigning to let people and businesses just treat everyone as people and on their merits without having to record which artificial pigeon holes the current fashion of diversity demand everyone fit into.

Just a thought.

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