grumpyf1

Sling yer hook! You're out of date, mate... 99% of the time, an apple looks exactly the same the day after you first scrutinised it. In all probability, it will taste exactly the same. Should it have deteriorated in either look or taste, I’m pretty certain you would identify that rapidly and decide if you wanted to start/continue your fruit-based snacking. Based on this simple fact (and applying it to all other fruit and veg too) it’s safe to say that putting a ‘Best before’ date on the packaging is pretty damn pointless. For many other products in packets and tins, that it supposedly means that the quality of your product may deteriorate after the specified date means very little too. ‘May’ is the key word in that sentence. Anyone with a vintage grandparent will have heard rattling yarns about consuming a tin of bully beef from World War II sometime in the 1970s and it never doing them any harm. I’m 92 you know! We made our own fun in them days! (etc.) Your baked bean...

I had some Tesco burgers last week, and my voice went all croaky afterwards. I was definitely a little horse. I expect you’ve heard all the jokes by now, since the startling discovery that Tesco, and various other supermarkets, were stocking beefy products that were a higher percentage of Shergar, rather than burger, than you’d generally think was reasonable. The brilliance of twitter shone through, with jokes and Photoshopped pictures doing the rounds before most people had even had time to look at their burger and chips and think “Ooo – should I? Maybe if I put more ketchup on.” This reminded me of a great story that an old boss of mine told me, back in the 90’s, when I worked for BT, having somehow gained employment with them as a computer operator, when I didn’t own one, or, in fact, had ever actually used one. Anyone under 30 is now trying to imagine how that could even be possible. Quite a few people I worked with wondered how it was possible I got the job, too. Anywa...