Is avoiding plastic making your grocery bills soar?

There seem to be quite a few bogeymen doing the rounds at the moment, but plastic is one of them. As Ross Clark wrote in last week’s Spectator cover feature, it’s the fashionable issue among environmental types at the moment – which is why the government has chosen to focus on it.

There are of course pros and cons to plastic – including the debate as to whether the alternatives to plastic are even worse than plastic itself. But it’s hard to argue against the observation that one of the biggest sources of what you might call ‘unnecessary’ plastics is food shopping. Cucumbers tend to be wrapped in plastic, as are your sausages from the butcher’s counter, and your loaf of bread; even dry food stuffs such as pasta. (Incidentally, there’s an amusing, but equally quite shocking, article by Damian Whitworth in The Times about his family’s attempt to avoid plastic in their weekly food shop, which is worth