Sainsbury UK and Excessive Packaging on Food

[teh_blumchenkinder]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...packaging.html
Supermarkets, less packaging, and Sainsbury (UK).
I get the impression that the 'breakdown' picture might be a bit specific-- ie, the photographer picked up stuff that may not usually be packaged ( bananas?)-- but... I dunno. Is this really a thing in the Kingdom? Over here in the North American Pacific Northwest, I typically see only meat products packaged similarly to what they show-- and almost no fresh produce packaged. Only berries (because they are small and fragile), some tomatoes, potatoes (and only sometimes, a lot of times they're in huge bins, like the melons and squashes and onions), garlic (and only sometimes), and only rarely broccoli and the like. ... thus why I think the picture might be a bit specific/manipulated.
Seems like the comment section is sensible and non-crazy... seems like some think their governing body is the crazy set!

[TelephoneAngel]

Unfortunately its not manipulated-lots of produce including bananas does come as shown - in a plastic sleeve.

[draggar]

Some items get packaged in larger-than-needed packaging to reduce theft.

We used to have cans of lobster meat stolen, as high as 25%, even when customers had to ask for it over the counter.

It dropped to less than 5% once we started to package it on large styrophoam and shrink wrapped.

[Whiskey]

i dont see how thats any really different than the produce bags they have in the grocery stores here. I see people bag bananas all the time

[Chromatix]

Looks like a specific mentality at work - everything must be wrapped in something, whether it needs it or not, and then the branding is added on top.

Some foods *do* needs to be wrapped in something. A century ago they would have been either canned or wrapped in greaseproof paper, in the latter case having been sold in the open by the butcher. Now it's just smothered with plastic before it ever reaches the retail premises.

Many other things were sold in bags and decanted into rigid containers at home (eg. coffee, sugar). There's a minor return to that now, as I can easily buy bags of coffee to refill the glass jars I bought a year ago.

Bananas don't need wrapping. They naturally come in a remarkably tough skin which resists a lot of abuse. If anything they might need protection from crushing, which a plastic bag doesn't provide - the crates they come into the country on do.

Some of the examples on that page are of the "luxury food to buy and eat now" variety, so you even get a fork bundled with this rather small portion of dessert, which you may or may not keep to use for something else. It's hard to see how that could be made less efficient - but it's really a fundamental problem of that type of product.

[BookstoreEscapee]

The one Shoprite near me usually has bananas in bags (though they often get taken out because people only want part of the bunch). Now that I think of it that's the only store I regularly see bananas in bags. There's a smaller Shoprite that doesn't.

[Magpie]

For a while the fair trade bananas were always in a bag, to distinguish them. I know that the organic ones now just have a plastic sticker wrapped around the bunch (think paper tape), so hopefully they're doing that with fair trade too. (What with it being students and other similarly-inclined people who petitioned for fair trade bananas in the first place, I can't see bagging them having gone over well.)