Tuesday 2 February 2010

Chocolate cake

I think i've discovered the mistake in Sainsburys price reduction logic. it came to me while staring at stale cakes reduced to £3. it seems the supermarket reduces the items based on their original price, rather than pricing them based on their actual worth (which in the case of a stale cake would be about 50p) the fact it used to be worth a lot more money is irrelevant.

i am opposed to this approach for two reasons: firstly i'm a tight Yorkshire man and here in Yorkshire i'm definitely not alone. i'm certainly not stupid enough to pay £3 for a stale cake, so the cakes that would be perfectly edible do not get eaten because they're priced far too high. this leads to the second reason that the cakes then get taken from the shelf and thrown in the bin. old food used to be given to the homeless but UK health and safety regulations put an end to that.

so the food gets wasted. wasting food really is a disgusting thing to do. the 'freegans' of the world (persons who liberate out of date food from food retail refuse bins) could then acquire this chocolate cake from the bin when it's thrown out at the close of the business day, except the bins are now padlocked because of health and safety reasons. it seems someone ate food out of a bin and successfully sued someone because they became ill. perhaps we should grill the lawyers and health and safety officers and then eat them. after that, if somebody gets sick precious little will happen.

in 2010 i think that some people have decided not to accept their inevitable death. they buy life insurance, wear 'anti-ageing' skin creams, they enforce rules and regulations to ensure that people won't get hurt through whatever obtuse or irrational reason. they pay for protection for their possessions, shopkeepers used to pay the mafias, now everyone pays the insurance companies. all these issues aside, none of this will avoid the unavoidable fact that when the time comes, that's it. it's all over. fully comprehensive gerbil insurance ain't guna keep your heart beating.

all this may come as a depressing thought that most would rather ignore. i can understand, death is a distressing concept to those that haven't done it many many times before. those that have might share my sentiment that meditating on the natural course of death is a genuinely magnificent way to appreciate life. because you don't know what you've got till you've gone.