A few years ago, my husband bought me a box of chocolates from Fortnum & Mason. It was a thing of beauty. Through the clear lid I saw an array of hand-crafted chocolate delights: tiny ribbons iced over oval fondants, pretty strawberry hearts, and those forbidding squares of coffee caramel. We hid the box from the children, ate a piece a night and it lasted for the whole of the holidays. This year, we thought to buy our aunts and uncles similarly delicious looking Fortnum’s boxes of chocolates.
It became an impossible task.
Never mind the dispiriting queue that began on Jermyn Street and sought only to remind shoppers they had fallen prey to the grim commercialisation of Christmas, but the boxes of chocolates were nowhere to be found. We wove past tins of biscuits, wooden boxes of Turkish delight and bulbous glasses of drunken peaches.
Of the chocolates: no sign.
There, suddenly by the tills did we spy a pretty display of chocolates – surely. Alas, they were marzipan fruits. A Japanese tourist was of the same mind and asked hopefully of the gentlemen proffering a tray of exquisite sweets, “Are these chocolates?”. “No, marzipan fruits… the chocolates are there…” “Where?” We all asked. He pointed to what was now obviously a large display of… turquoise boxes.
Not a chocolate however in sight.
He explained further, “Fortnum’s are putting an end to plastic in their packaging. We marzipan fruit makers are an independent company that supplies Fortnum’s. Next year, ours too shall be behind solid cardboard boxes.”
We thanked him and moved dispiritedly to the display. What lurked inside the opaque boxes was anyone’s guess. No tiny caramel hearts iced onto chocolate pots, no white and pink raspberry delights, no lightly dusted balls of truffle. Just bland cardboard boxes.
Of course, Fortnum & Mason doesn’t really care about the planet and the overuse of resources for, if it did, it would shut up shop immediately. There is nothing in the store that anyone actually needs; it is all luxurious flummery. Fortnum’s is just trying to make a futile, pointless gesture so it can crow somewhere, to someone who also doesn’t really care, about its transition to plastic-free packaging.
We bought some marzipan fruits, a jar of stilton and went home. I recommend that anyone of sense avoids the tourist trap of Fortnum’s and instead buys his or her beautifully packed chocolates this year from Chocolate Craft in Hampshire, where plastic lids reveal the exquisite chocolates in all their tempting glory.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.
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If you haven’t filled your stomach with beef the are you really going to feel like some chocolate? This is nothing. You will have no meat no fresh produce just insect-meal. It strikes me that you are clinging to a bygone age.
Just imagine the hordes of insects being marched into molten chocolate only to solidify in rows in their eco-boxes.
That reminds me of the chocolate covered ants you could buy in Exeter when I was a kid (unless you preferred the fried grasshoppers). They were clearly ahead of the curve. But I think they may have been in a tin, and those use fossil fuel
Personally I preferred the cockroach cluster or crunchy frog.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2odo4b
Our times have no anthems or music in this country. You might want to look at that. Given that we live in a time of great upheaval and yet there is no poetry. Even in The Great Depression in America you had the likes of Woody Guthrie talking about A Better World a’comin. Are we really that deflated as a nation I think we need to acknowledge that we are if it is to improve.
Well I woke up this mornin
My plastic done left me
Well I woke up this mornin
My plastic done left me
I ain’t about to be messin
with none of dat cardboard—cause
I got the Recycled Plastic Blues.
I no longer got my Blue Swede Shoes
My cartons are no longer to be used.
I got the recycled plastic blues.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/breaking-news-mark-drakeford-resigns/
The rapist’s Dad has called it a day.
TFFT!
I hope Annie, once of these parts and more lately of Lockdown Sceptics reddit, is rejoicing. Dungford, as she called him.
You won’t bring your country back to life by talking about it. Most of the battle is seeing how they robbed or occluded you. My only wish is to try and help a people heading foir disaster because I love the language and the literature and all the regions. I hope that there is the energy left to save it. They will never beat it out of me I carry the mythos around. Just don’t take it for granted and in our time we should support each other.
We are talking about imminent escalation on two fronts. It is easy when its just on a sceen but honestly you need to have the physical conditioning and alacrity to be able to deal with things. If you are an out of shape couch potato then that is perfectly understandable but it will make a difference if you switch into a different mode.
No chocolates then?
Marzipan fruits are my favorite
On a slightly less posh shopping mission, I looked in Sainsbury’s for some decent chocs for my missus. Picking up a box of a very well known British brand, with a cardboard top,
I immediately noted that there was some plastic, six pieces of sellotape about 10mm wide and 25mm long, three per side, fastening the top to the bottom of the box. Amazingly, someone had run their thumbnail across the strips on one side and had removed three chocolates.
Obviously I purchase a box of a Swiss brand that was enveloped in a thin but secure transparent and hygenic wrapping.
Note that even with all six sellotape strips intact, the box was quite open to dust and any bug that passed by.
One hopes that some pensioner didn’t buy a box with missing chocolates. And perhaps others that have been licked.
How long before we have cretins and crims holding Sainsbury’s to ransom because they have very easily inserted something toxic into a box somewhere?
Proper packaging isn’t just to make the box shiny, you know.
But of course, Sainsbury’s think that saving the planet is most important.
Plastic is a great product. And guess what it NEVER chucks itself on the ground. It is people who do that. So why do we blame innocent plastic for destroying the planet?
To avoid the queues at F&M use the St Pancras one. No idea what kind of chocolates they well but their mince pies and cognac butter are nice, especially washed down with their Irish Breakfast tea. But I am now worried at what might be in the mince pies!