Heinz have introduced a new fridge pot for baked beans – you can take just what you need without having to worry about how to store the rest for another day.
This strikes me as a great idea, though my days for needing industrial supplies of baked beans to hand have, thankfully, now passed. But they would be a boon for other foods which we use often but in small quantities which supermarkets no longer provide.
I really look forward to the day when we can buy plum tomatoes this way.
And canned fruit too. A recent edition of River Cottage aimed to address the problem of falling sales of fresh fruit in this country. Even strawberry sales are down.
In my youth we got a large proportion of our fruit from cans, especially in winter. There is a lot to be said for a return to that, at least until they can solve the problem of selling us fresh fruit which is really ripe. But since I suspect that that will never be possible, at least not without unacceptably high levels of waste & spoilage, far better to harvest & can it at the moment of perfect ripeness.
Canned food went out of fashion when first frozen & then fresh vegetables became more widely available & canned fruit went with it, helped by the panic about sugar in the syrup. Now we know how to can without the addition of excessive sugar there is a lot to be said for going back, especially if it comes in a handy pot for the fridge.
Fresh fruit are different from vegetables in another way too – we no longer have to buy all the mud on potatoes or the haulm on the peas or the inedible stalks of cabbage & then feed them to the pigs or put them in the garbage at home. Nobody has really cracked the problem of selling fresh fruit without all the trimmings too, so my guess is that there would be no net gain in the amount of unnecessary & extravagant waste.
