It’s absurd to feel jealous of a fruit, but I have to admit to a small stab of envy to see how lovingly cosseted Marks & Spencer’s mangoes are. Or at least one variety the store is currently stocking: a nam dok mai mango. It sits, cosy in its rigid plastic shell, and is wearing what appears to be a fetching bright-yellow knitted jumper, doubled over for extra warmth and coddling. I feel sad for the second-tier mangoes on the shelf beneath, naked of sweaters or shells, jumbled and bumping into each other.
But it’s not M&S’s mango that is the subject of minor emissions of outrage on social media, though – that target would be its pre-chopped avocado. “Customers love an avocado, but they’re sometimes not the easiest to prepare,” said M&S product developer Erica Molyneaux. “So we’ve done the messy bit for them and created a ready sliced, fully ripened option.”
“M&S starts selling pre-sliced avocado, because cutting is a struggle,” goes the sarcastic headline, forgetting that cutting is indeed a struggle for many people, including those with arthritis and other difficulties with mobility. That aside, it’s hard to feel too angry about pre-sliced avocado when we’ve long had pre-torn lettuce leaves, pre-diced fruit salad or pre-spiralised and chopped vegetables. Or peeled, hard-boiled eggs in plastic pots at sandwich chains. Or, indeed, pre-prepared sandwiches.
But about 5m tons of packaging goes through UK households every year and, yes, most people can probably survive without pre-cut avocado in a plastic pot. There was enough social media indignation about peeled oranges sold in a plastic tub to get Whole Foods to remove them from its shelves. The same happened after people complained about pre-peeled bananas sold in a shrink-wrapped plastic tray at a supermarket in Austria.
Despite first appearances, packaging is not always a crime. A plastic-wrapped cucumber, for instance, lasts three times longer than one sold without, and bags of potatoes and grapes sold by the supermarket Morrisons have led to less waste in store (previously, odd small bunches of grapes or single potatoes would get thrown away).
Packaging can help prevent food waste, and food waste is said to be at least 10 times more damaging to the environment than packaging waste. Is it worth taking a hit on packaging to prevent food from spoiling and being thrown away? Nobody from Wrap, the sustainability organisation, which does a lot of work on packaging, was available to say. Still, it’s hard to reconcile that idea when you see a single mango in a foam sweater, or – perhaps even worse, and spotted again at M&S – a four-pack of pears, nestled in a tray, with a hard plastic shield on top. The whole thing was wrapped in another layer of plastic.
