Pomegranates - the land fill connection

Pomegranates. Punica granatum. Love them or hate them, you can't ignore them. Or maybe you can. In fact I think I did ignore them for far too long. Even now they are an occasional purchase that enter my fruit eating orbit about twice a year.

The problem with pomegranates is their packaging. Their leathery skin is the devil to peel. It's easy to be too rough and split the pips with all its sticky consequences. Equally it is difficult to avoid the bitter-tasting yellow pith that binds the pips together.

Having said that, there are few sights in nature more satisfying than the snugly fitting arrangement of pips on the inside of a pomegranate.

My quandry is whether they are worth the effort. Down at my local Waitrose I was about to reach for one of these six-monthly challenges when out of the corner of my eye I saw a flat-pack plastic box of pomegranate pips. I guess there would have been the equivalent of a single fruit.

Comparing costs, the ready-pipped fruit was priced about the same as the full fruit. The equation didn't stack up. I would have thought that "pomegranate minus effort" would have been more expensive than "pomegranate plus labour". So I bought the box, feeling a little bit pleased with myself... until I got home.

"You should have bought the pomegranate," said Gill. "The last thing we need is more packaging. We have to take a stand."

Gill, my wife, is our household recycling gauleiter. This means we have upended tin cans drying on the radiator and more uses for a plastic milk container than Blue Peter had for its ubiquitous Squeezy bottle.

The rest of the family has been a little tardy in learning all we need to know about recycyling but Gill appears to be ahead of the game since there are new proposals for councils to penalise those who don't recycle and reward those who do.

The danger here is that penalties will encourage fly tipping or the clandestine emptying of rubbish in to the bins of neighbours. How long will it be before we have locking wheelie bins? I would go for incentives every time. I remember taking back crates of bottles for the refunds you had on the empties when I was a boy. At the same time we carted old woollens to the "rag man" and bits of lead and copper to the scrap metal dealer. Recycling is virtuous and necessary. We don't have the land fill to cope with increasing levels of waste.

Incentives or taxes should also be levied on those who produce packaging such as the pomegranate pippers. As a born-again recycler I must recant any previous attraction to packaged pips. How could anyone believe they could better nature's glorious packaging? The pomegranate is the future, sticky pips, pith and all.