RETAIL RANDOMS

BEFORE YOU GO: SYNTHETIC ALCOHOL / FOOD WASTE

SYNTHETIC ALCOHOL: THE SMART SOLUTION TO DRY JANUARY

After the excesses of the festive period, January is always a popular time for gin-soaked Brits to give their livers a break. But for the smart and pedantic among us, there may be a neat get-out solution to avoiding booze this month: synthetic alcohol.

What is synthetic alcohol? Well, it’s sort of an alcohol-free alcohol that still delivers “all the benefits but without the use of ethanol”. The website also implies that it is a hangover-free product, which would be nice.

Produced by British-based business GABA Labs, which is apparently a pioneer in the alcohol alternative space, a new botanical spirit called Sentia launches this month containing GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) which is a naturally occurring substance that allegedly produces a calming effect, enhancing conviviality and sociability.

If you fancy a look, check out sentiaspirits.com.

FOOD WASTE ON AN EPIC SCALE

Among the many unintended consequences of a short-notice third lockdown is the fact that somewhere in the region of 15 million school dinners are heading for the bin – perfectly good but perishable food that will simply end up going to landfill.

National waste collections company BusinessWaste. co.uk, which is tasked with collecting the mountains of food waste, have calculated that three million school meals are served each day with the cost of each meal approximately £2. That makes £6m a day or £30m a week.

Spokesperson Mark Hall said: “This is a national disaster because schools typically order a week in advance. The government have well and truly let the schools down, they have allowed them to open and prepare for the weeks ahead, which of course means stocking the fridges high for this week’s school dinners and now those dinners are going in the bin.

“The schools simply don’t have the freezers required to store all the perishable food and that unfortunately will mean the vast majority is to be thrown away. The amount of food waste caused by a sudden lockdown is staggering – if they had been given warning then it could have been sent to other places, but now food banks will be overwhelmed and they typically only take non-perishable goods.”