ARCHIVE: Edwardian Man – Waste of Space

What in the world do the big emporiums think they are doing? Why do they continue to waste packaging? Take a trip in any automobile to these places and you will see aisle after aisle of goods all packaging that makes the buying of those goods redundant. Take apples, do apples fall from the tree in plastic bags, or worst still, sweet confectionary that is sold to small children, who have neither the brain power or the capacity to understand recycling. So, what do the confectioners do to circumnavigate this problem? They produce packaging that CANNOT be recycled! This is a waste, this is morally repugnant to teach small children that recycling is NOT important. Why throw things away, cans, yes cans should be used in the garden as cheap flower pots, they work wonders for tropical type plants, such as tomatoes. Why do we have plastic? Paper is so much better, a paper bag from any emporium can be reused time after time or can easily be shredded, pulped and made into something else. Why in my youth, my Mother used to cut these bags into small squares and give them to the servants to use in their toilet. There is nothing more English than paper squares hanging from a nail in a water closet. Then there is shrink wrapping, yet again, one must ask do our vegetables emerge from the earth like this? Gone is the ability to touch them, to select the ripe, to discard the rotten for pigs and the poor. There was a time, when a young gentleman, hard up due to bad business dealings, could go to any market at the end of a day and pick up enough cheap, past their best, vegetables to make a broth for him and his colleagues. One could send the parlour maid or the kitchen boy to the market to purchase the finest vegetables for the table, the best pineapple for showing, and still have enough money left over to buy the scraps for those below stairs. This is another reason that the class system has collapsed, this is the middle classes run wild with their desire to shrink wrap and partition everything, look what the middle class administrators did to India.