The Not-very-obvious Relationship between Packaging and Terrorism.

One thing we have noticed here is how much more packaging is used in the grocery stores here as opposed to Canada. 

We have been enjoying many delicious English delicacies (is that a contradiction in terms?) while here – Stilton cheese, pork pies, sausage rolls, English cucumbers, tomatoes, chocolate, and Eccles cakes (Nancy's fave) – taken with either tea (which Nancy has finally learned how to make properly) or English cider and ale. Because eating in restaurants will break us in no time, we have been buying our food in grocery stores, and we have been eating it al fresco (on park benches), the backpacker thing, to save money. This is a budget tour!

Shopping in the grocery stores and little snack shops is a different experience for sure. There seems to be an excess of packaging on everything, from fruit, meat and vegetables to pre-cooked food. There are large sections of the store that have pre-cooked food from soups to curry and even cooked white rice. This probably doesn't sound any different to Canada, but it is. The rice, for example comes as a couple scoops of rice loosely put in a 3x5 inch hard plastic stack-able container (the same kind of stuff they use to make water bottles). Everything is like that. Even the sushi pieces come in individual packages (as if anyone ever buys one). The packaged food containers are not that Styrofoam plate and plastic wrap that you see a lot of in Canada but the same kind of packaging you might get a crush-able pie or fancy cake in. 

This might seem like a silly thing to observe in such a worldly blog as this, but here is the issue; there are also no public garbage cans or trash receptacles, because that is where terrorists put bombs. The terror linkage! Wherever we go we notice that there is no place to put our garbage (rubbish). Couple that fact with the fact that everything we buy to eat is packaged in that hard plastic leaves us in a bit of a conundrum. It's not like you can roll the package up and stuff it in your pocket; with a couple of coffee cups, a sandwich package and an Eccles cake package in your pocket, one starts to look like an officer cadet at basic training. I think that is why all the travel clothes you can now buy have pockets like combat pants and jackets; so you can take your garbage with you. Those aren't cargo pants, they're garbage pants!