Rant warning! Are we becoming a nation of bone idle wastrels.

Nelliemoser the cost of the prepared fruit to me is eye watering. Such a waste of money when one could spend a minute chopping using a knife.

Sorry about the there it just appeared.

Two (very small) hard boiled eggs for £1 in our local Asda!

OMG have people lost the ability to boil an egg, or is it sheer bone idleness?

You can buy hard-boiled eggs???

Even Nigella writes about buying ready chopped packets of fruit

You can buy ice for goodness sake!

Yes, big bags of it!

I've seen people buy those and wondered what they were going to do with them when they got home....presumably put them in the er, freezer?

Well at least someone has benefited from the demise of Home Economics which was then reincarnated as Food Technology ! Just a great pity it is the likes of Mr Tesco and his ilk and not a generation of young people.

It's getting here (France )....ready -to- eat fresh fruit. Flippin' eck, how much effort is involved in peeling an orange, or a hard boiled egg? At the moment we are safe with crusts on bread. Crusty bread (the sort you can break your teeth on) is sacristant,which probably explains why so many elderly French have,shall we say politely, an orthodontic problem.
I had no idea Kingsmill were charging more for cutting the crusts off a sliced loaf. What a rip-off!

I see Hugh FW has a new prog.on tv next week on waste. Unfortunatelý despite many such programmes the message doesn't seem to get through.

The supermarkets say its what the consumer wants..... is that really so? Surely food-safety -wise, all this ready- to- eat stuff is nowhere near as safe as an orange, a banana, or a pineapple in its natural state.? I.e. wearing a protective coat. I can appreciate a portion of ready- prepped fruit salad is ideal for someone on their own, so there are pros and cons.

I always thought that part of the joy of making a home cooked meal was in the preparation. I actually like chopping up vegetables! (Am I odd)? I wouldn't dream of wasting money buying ready chopped veg. I agree that the vitamin and mineral content must be compromised, particularly if you don't use them straight away.

Is Waitrose the only store that sells bags of weather-damaged apples? I find these to be of very good value with very few real blemishes, especially the Worcesters that were available last week. This week they're back to the usual Galas.

Daft isn't it (though I do admit to buying bags of ice).

I bought those big bags of ice! It was for a summer party and the freezer was already full of other stuff I had preprepared from scratch!

Went to stay with DD last Xmas and did admit to being silently shocked to see a big bag of ice in her freezer. Said nowt, best way with grown-up kids I've discoverd ,and I have to admit they came in handy for a quick G&T. Having seen how convenient they were, I confess I snitched the idea and went down the DIY route with a couple of ice cube trays and some zip lock freezer bags. Much easier than wrestling with the plastic tray and fielding jet propelled ice cubes round the kitchen Especially on a hot evening when you're gasping for a drink

If people don't mind paying someone else to chop up their fruit for them (that's essentially what buyers of ready chopped fruit and veg are doing), why should anyone else mind?

The waste issue is problematic but I think that is there anyway. With any luck, shops send their compostable waste to be composted like the rest of us.

I quite often buy small, ready prepped bags of veg, which are usually on a deal at M&S and work out much cheaper as I live alone. This way I can get the variety of veg I like without any waste as it can take me a heck of a long time to wade through a large cauli or cabbage.

We have bought big bags of ice (and some of our friends and family have too) but only to use in buckets or coolboxes to keep drinks cold on summer days when people come. There isn't always room in the fridge for lots of cans or bottles of wine if it's full of food for everyone!

I wouldn't put it in a drink, we do make our own for that

And if I've been out all day and picked a M&S ready meal or left a casserole simmering in the slow cooker I have sometimes bought a small bag of veg to go with it
And sometimes I have bought a pack of ready cut up mango and pineapple and eaten it for lunch when I've been out ...

Oh dear I must be a bone idle wastrel

ps I do most of our food preparation at home from scratch btw, I am just talking about sometimes

I buy ready prepared fruit when we are on our boat. I just don't have the space to store a whole pineapple + a whole watermelon + a large box of strawberries + a mango, or whatever.
Even if I did have space, it would probably go mouldy before we could eat it all.
The one that gets me is pre-grated cheese. I mean how hard can it be to grate a few ounces of cheese

I am the only one who would eat pineapple and I end up throwing half of it away, so a small pack when I am out is a treat.

Pre grated cheese is often cheaper to buy, and my wrist hurts if I have to grate a lot of it. I often cook lasagne when we're away [and cauliflower cheese] and the pre grated stuff makes for an easy meal. We do price it up first though, and only buy it if it works out cheaper.

Actually, jane, if you have arthritis/fibromyalgia affecting your hands, grating cheese is quite painful. I often ask DH to do cheese grating for me. So I can fully understand someone buying ready grated stuff.

We bough it when we had hens, really cheap grated cheese, because they loved it and it was easy to chuck out a handful for them each day rather than grating a bit a day or a whole block and storing it.