No more milk in glass bottles, says Dairy Crest. 260 jobs will go, plastic is preferred and cheaper.
Is that because plastic is cheaper – really – or because you can’t persuade a significant number of people to deal with milk at the door when it might be delivered or collected with the rest of the groceries? 
If plastic is cheaper how is it that the imported French crème fraiche (forget half fat, fat free or any other tweak) is the cheapest, sold in a glass jar?
Put “is burning wood environmentally friendly?” into the search machine and again, it seems that the answer depends on who you ask – the purveyors of stoves? The environmental agencies? The local authorities?
Check out an article called Power Struggle by Danny Fortson, pictures by Jez Coulson in The Sunday Times Magazine, 28 September. It’s about bringing in wood pellets from Mississippi for the power station at Drax in North Yorkshire. And it gives a whole new slant to the idea of food miles, food in this case for the furnace. 
Everybody has an opinion, everybody has answers for the questions but what is to be believed?
When I recently injured a knee, my GP – a sensible Ulsterwoman with people skills – said that she’s like to have an MRI of the afflicted joint with a view to (query) arthroscopy. Immediately a friend sent me details of a Canadian survey which showed that some 8oo plus people who had had arthroscopy had suffered discomfort severe enough to call pain and no improvement. When I raised it with the attentive registrar at the local teaching hospital, he said in their opinion, it was a good intervention but required some sensitivity in timing – administered too soon or too late, it was a wasted procedure. I can see those of you who have had some experience of timing and the NHS smiling wryly.
Cheap or free is supposed to be the ultimate recommendation. But it backfires:
look at the number of people who don’t bother to ring to say “No thank you, not coming” so the appointment can be cancelled: they don’t have to bother. It’s free, free to be treated with contempt.
And we are caught up in generalities like the stylistic director of J. Crew listing
Fabulous Fixes for the Over Forties – only they may not work for you. Most of them didn’t for me. “You must” she says authoritatively “wear a tinted moisturiser.”
Well I would but there has never been one invented that didn’t upset my skin.
Same with pressed powder. There is something in those products, probably a fixative or something to prolong shelf life that makes me break out in a rash. So although J.Crew have the most agreeable store staff in London, I am much more likely to be influenced by India Knight (also in the ST) who writes about what works for her and in the case of Raw Virgin Coconut Oil (a pure plant product) it’s cheap enough to play with and incidentally has been miraculous on my poor old scaly hands..
About every decade, a man or a woman stops washing their hair ie stops using shampoo and there is a little story about it, we all wrinkle our noses except those of us who are persuaded and the story goes away until next time. But we don’t know what shampoo does. Its claims like those of so many cosmetics are more to do with anxiety than health. Like toothpaste. You can clean your teeth with wood ash or soot or salt and you won’t smell clean and minty but your teeth will be OK especially if you keep up the dental appointments and use floss every day. There are whole nations of people who don’t use toothpaste or shampoo.
But finding out how to deal with a damp patch on the living room wall or how to
approach your landlord about purchase of the freehold requires specialist knowledge and there will always be half a dozen answers from which you will have to select one.
In spite of more information, there are still specialists in every degree from those who know to those who sound as if they know, and you are at their mercy still.
You don’t know who to believe.
Annalog 