ºRegular readers of this rubbish will know that Mrs. Sánchez and I are aspiring oil barons. With a little and by no means negligible help from Sánchez Pequeño our little trees are producing around 1000 kilos of olives a year and the oil is pretty good too (although I say it myself as shouldn't, as Mrs. Sánchez would say. It's hard work picking olives even if you don't fall down a crevasse and do your back in. The olives are worth about 30 centimos (26p) a kilo if you sell them at the olive mill.
Basic black pitted olives in sunflower oil are about £12.00 a kilo in supermarkets in the UK at the moment. Not a bad mark up. All our olives are pressed for oil.
Last Thursday Matt and I binned 20 kilos of perfectly good, in date black olives in sunflower oil. I make that £240 worth of olives headed for expensive and environmentally harmful landfill. We was only following orders.
In the bin they go. The scissors are to puncture the packaging so that hungry foragers will turn their noses up.
These unfortunate and totally blameless healthy Mediterranean fruits fell foul of the crazy system of food supply in Britain. Every week thousands of tons of perfectly good and edible food is thrown away, not just by the public (a relatively small amount) but by the big supermarket chains themselves, most of which are reporting increases in profits despite the Recession.
Organisations like the charity FareShare help to avoid much of this waste by taking 'near use by date' or or 'over-ordered' food directly from the central depots (before it reaches the supermarkets).
But even though the Birmingham branch alone redistributes many tons every week, if the fresh meat, ready meals, olives etc. can not find a home by 'use by date', it's the end of the line and in the bin they go. Heartbreaking and, for me, ironic, innit?
Meanwhile in Spain, with over 6 million people unemployed and an inadequate social security 'safety net', families increasingly have to sign up for food handouts. The Charity 'Caritas' estimates that more than 3 million Spaniards live in severe poverty.
Ironically, perhaps, the banks are collecting food donations in their branches. My bank, La Caixa has a big box for donations by customers.
In the centre of Madrid a 'solidarity' machine' has been installed by 'Mensajeros de la Paz' (Messengers of Peace). Passers- by can put their change into a slot and choose which food item they want to donate; rice, milk chickpeas etc.
Meanwhile Spaniards signup to learn English in anticipation of work in England.
Les deseo mucha suerte .
14th. January 2014
