Whose to blame? Well, a bit of everyone but in the end we all pay, and in these times of financial hardship we would be crazy not to accept a free meal if we can get it. I am old enough to remember pig food when food waste was sold to a local farmer who boiled it up and fed it to his pigs.

This doesn’t of course solve the problem of why we waste so much food but it seems that we demand perfectly formed, customised, standardised, clean fresh and frozen food and if it turns out otherwise it is rejected either by the supermarket/retailers or the prospective buyer but somewhere along the line we end up paying for it. Perfectly good food is ploughed back into the land. Our obsession with sell by dates is bizarre as it is for the benefit of the supermarket/retailer but doesn’t mean to say it is inedible after that date. If it looks ok, smells ok and tastes ok, then there is every chance it is ok.

So next time you whinge about prices in the supermarket, or in the restaurant, remember it is your so called demands and unwillingness to accept a less than beautiful looking, variable size product that is hiking up the price. Think local, think ugly!

None of the above, just old fashion lack of enough hours in a day. I have requested a further day be added to the week but as yet our new Government have not seen fit to grant my request.

Whilst here, perhaps I can mention something. The Morsbags scheme. This is a scheme whereby people donate old fabrics which are made into bags by volunteers all over the world and then given away in an effort to help reduce the millions of plastic bags used  every day. HRH The Prince of Wales is donating some old curtains from Clarence House as part of his new campaign to promote sustainability. Just a thought.

Back soon – promise.

Overly dramatic? Well, I made the last bit up but the first bit is very real. In every ocean of the world there is a plastic garbage dump of huge proportions. The Pacific Garbage Dump is twice the size of Great Britain. Plastic does not bio-degrade and can stay around for a million years. Some of it will break up and become absorbant “nurdles” taking in pesticides, cooling agents and other nasties. These in turn are eaten by small sea-creatures which feed on plankton and so enter the food chain. At some point it will be eaten by you

Scientists are not sure what can be done about this “garbage patch” but you can help by ensuring all plastics are recycled or re-used and don’t end up in our oceans. Sleep tight!

I do hope this doesn’t mean that we clear even more hectares of rain forest in order to grow sugarcane!

I would also like to take to task the hotel in the Scilly Isles who wanted to recruit a “nice, kind chef”. Well really! I expect all nasty, unkind chefs everywhere to march on parliament and demand justice for the truly awful people that they are. Harriet Harman, where are you when they need you?

Certainly if you get the chance you should go and make sure you take the children. One amazing fact I came away with amongst many. Eden plan to bore down 4 kilometers using the faults in the bedrock to force a way through. This will produce water and energy coming out of the ground at around 150 – 160 C. It will produce enough heat and energy to provide for the Eden Project and supply a further 4,000 houses. Wow!

The elimination of waste is a hobby horse of Gordon Campbell Gray who is chairman of Campbell Gray Hotels with properties in London, Antigua, Beirut and France. “So much of what we offer guests because it supposedly epitomises luxury they do not want and therefore it invaribly gets wasted. Guests these days are far more in tune with what the real world is like, and expect hoteliers amongst others to be doing their bit to cut down on unnecessary gestures of opulence.”

Clearly there are messages here for fellow hoteliers, and the growing membership of CHA and its influence within the hotel industry is a positive sign the message that something must be done and ways must be changed is getting through.

The Caterer & Hotelkeeper which is running a Green Month during October is full of useful ideas and tips on sustainability, much of it offered by CHA members.

The second programme will stay with me for a very long time if not forever. Wounded was a programme about the rehabilitation of two soldiers who suffered appalling injuries in Afghanistan, one losing both legs and an arm, and the other both legs and impared sight. The work carried out by the surgeons and nurses was so humbling, only suprassed by the courage and bravery of the two soldiers. In years gone by they would not have survived, and I am sure there were times when they wished they hadn’t. I will never complain about any ache or pain again. It is nothing to what those guys went through and there will be many others to come to add to those who have been through it already.

I hope the world leaders swanning around in the US saw the programmes, particularly Wounded (I would have frog marched all politicians to a TV and ordered them to view it several times). Questions need to be asked and continue to be asked until all troops are properly equipped and protected against the beastliness and awfulness that goes on in these far off places in the name of democracy.