It’s not just tourists that need to worry about that stuff. I have friends with Somali heritage and they don’t want to go there either, even with having family there.

I am a huge tea drinker and also like the Tiger tea like that, just with oat milk not cow juice.

Ok, but we’re getting dragged into a tangential debate about farming when really my point was that we need to look at waste through the whole supply chain, from farming ingredients to getting put on the shelves. I’m sure we could pick apart the contribution of any one part of that chain and debate how significant it is. Together, at all points in the chain, there is plastic waste that the consumer doesn’t see.

(And btw Canada isn’t in the top 20 of global producers, according to the IMF / CIA World Factbook as at 2018; the EU is number 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture)

Edited to add: this 2022 UN report states that plastics are used extensively in agriculture and goes into how they are used and how they enter soil and water supplies: https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/40403/Plastics_Agriculture.pdf

And this is another UN report on the issue, stating that Asia is the largest user of plastics in agriculture. When China and India are two of the largest agricultural producers, that’s an issue https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/12/1107342

So according to this link https://www.ciwm.co.uk/ciwm/knowledge/agricultural-waste.aspx

"Plastic packaging waste from agriculture represents approximately 1.5% of the overall volume of plastic packaging in the waste stream in England. The types of plastic wastes arising can vary and be both bulky and dirty often making the management of these wastes difficult. Around 135,500 tonnes of agricultural plastic waste is produced each year in the UK with;

Approximately 32,000 tonnes being produced from plastic packaging waste; and
Approximately 103,500 tonnes being produced from Non-Packaging Plastics (including contamination)."

That’s just England. The data is old (2003 I think), and yes 1.5% is not huge, granted, but that’s of total plastic waste, not just from the food chain. A lot of our produce comes from Asia and North Africa where generally there just aren’t the same facilities for recycling, and environmental issues are not as prioritised. It’s great that there’s very little plastic waste in your farming methods, but it’s not the same around the world.

Which country are you in? Where I live my food comes from all around the world. Recycling is mostly a Western thing. It doesn’t exist in many of the countries that supply our food. I was just going by the amount of crap I’ve seen in many agricultural areas. Plastic sacks, containers etc.

The problem that strikes me reading through this thread, and similar conversations about packaging, is that we can do all we want to reduce packaging and plastics at the consumer end, but there’s a huuuuge amount of packaging all the way through the supply chain. From farming supplies, to ingredient packaging, and the packaging used to transport food products to stores. By focussing solely on the consumer end we’re not addressing the whole issue. It’s like the obsession with bamboo toothbrushes and paper / metal straws. They’re consumerist solutions to a problem caused by consumerism.

Yeah I think it was the Wikipedia page that I read when I looked up who they are. They’re also fixing search engine results because there’s no reason why I in the UK should be getting so many results for an Israeli organisation when I’m looking for information on organisations in a different country. Well I mean there is a reason but it’s not a good one.

I couldn’t pick just one, but these come to mind right now:

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Maps https://youtu.be/oIIxlgcuQRU

Loads of songs by Anohni / Antony and the Johnsons but particularly this one Hope There’s Someone https://youtu.be/LyMGEq82uL4

Yes. I’d just say “you know how the Courts have the power to do X, and decide Y? Well the government decided to devolve those powers to an independent office, so that people didn’t have to pay for lawyers and deal with complicated legal processes. I work in that office making the Y decisions.”

Sure, here’s the ones I found on Etsy in the UK:

https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/177167563/100-british-wool-filled-inserts-12-14-16

Wool ball filled cushion pads. They’re really plump, and just the right level of firmness, so much nicer than synthetic or feather. Each pay day I’m ordering a couple, and gradually my sofa is turning into a cosy nest.

Oh wow, TIL. Yeah I am not a fan of them. Urgh.

Sexist, much?

Oh no, someone who writes about gardening!! In a magazine for the elderly!!Look, it was just the first article I could find while I was in the middle of baking, that wasn’t an American health and wellbeing website. I’m not American so I don’t know those websites and I don’t know what they all are. I just wanted to help the person I was replying to. The article links to the charity that has done loads of research into it. Yes I could have found a better link and fucking hell I wish I hadn’t bothered even commenting now.

Yeah that’s my phone autocorrecting. I’m not sure why anyone would think I meant ‘restrain’, but oh well. I’ll edit, thanks for pointing it out.

I only realised I’d lost my smell completely when I smelled some perfume and thought it must be off, because it smelled of nothing. Then I realised that my other perfumes were ‘off’, and then went around my home smelling random things and finally realised it was me. I think it was the effect on my taste that was the hardest thing though. Onions and garlic especially made everything taste horrible.

Thank you. I should have realised that it needed more of an explanation. Shame that people don’t engage their brains before a trigger finger downvote in a science thread though.

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Apologies if you’ve already tried this or something similar, it doesn’t work for everyone, but I got mine back by using essential oils to retrain [edited as my phone autocorrected to ‘restrain’] my olfactory system. After over a year of my food tasting like trash, or like it was off, and a dangerous incident (with a trip to A&E) where my brain fog meant I left an unlit gas oven on all night and couldn’t smell it until I’d already got carbon monoxide poisoning (thankfully mild and temporary), I regained my smell and taste in about a week. Here’s an article about it, it links to a charity that works in the field of loss of smell : https://www.saga.co.uk/magazine/health-wellbeing/treatments/smell-training-for-anosmia

Edit: if the down votes are because people think this is alternative medicine or woo, it isn’t, it’s a technique used in conventional medicine clinics. Try reading before you down vote.

Your comment comes across as ignorant and flippant tbh. When treatment makes you so ill you’d rather die, a lot of people choose to stop treatment. If a lower dose can be effective, shouldn’t that be explored, so that people’s quality of life can improve and they are able to make it through to the end of treatment?