Lum

I got this idea from the ABDs Height Kills page, but decided to expand on it. The further away from motoring you get the more absurd it looks.

The initial situation is caused when a 12yr old is left to fend for himself for a few weeks because his parent(s) are too high to care. Eventually money gets low, so he stops buying from KFC every night and instead his parents feed him a 3 week old chicken they found, he gets some nasty disease and dies.

There is a public outcry, not because of the smack-head parents but because he used food that was 3 weeks old and obviously unsafe. The government responds by announcing a raft of hard hitting food safety measures...

Under the new law, it is now illegal to open food that is past it's age limit. For the most unsafe foods (eg. chicken, fresh fish etc.) this is set at 3 weeks, the safest foods (tinned foods) are set at the national age limit, marked by a black stripe across the top of the tin. This is 6 weeks for tinned fruit and 7 weeks for tinned meat and vegetables. Groups considered to have higher cholesterol (eg. HGV drivers) are subject to lower limits still. Most non-tinned foods are set at 3 weeks, but foods deemed to be childrens food (eg. fish fingers) are set to 2 weeks. The law makes no distinction between food that is opened for personal consumption and food that is to be fed to others.

Things continue along as before until someone else dies after eating a 20 yr old tin of Campbells soup they found in their garage next to the paint thinners, at which point it is revealed that consumers are wildly flouting the new law with many consuming tinned food that is up to 6 months old. The government decides it's time to get tough and decides to come up with a way of blanket enforcing the rules.

Since most of the offences involve tinned food, a device called a Canera is invented (more details later) and a year long study is carried out. The study is carried out using cans at all the food stores near to where Harold Shipman used to practice and after a year it concludes that Caneras could have saved over 250 lives in this area and should be rolled out nationwide.

The canera is a small battery powered GPS/radio device attached to the inside of a can lid, once it is opened, it gets a signal, reads the date and time from GPS and if it is past a pre-programmed limit (eg. 6 weeks) it radios base with it's location and a notice is sent to the owner of the identified house requiring that they identify who opened the can.

Nothing really changes. Most people still don't eat 2 week old chicken so there is no point enforcing that, many people don't want to throw away perfectly safe food and start getting £60 fines every so often (and lose 3 nectar points) they complain that this is just a stealth tax on food but nothing is done. Many people who opened 6 1/2 week old tinned tomatoes thinking they were vegetables get a nasty shock a few days later when the NIP arrives

At the other end of the spectrum, fans of organic food completely fail to see the point and assume that just because their personal circumstances are convinient enough that they can get to the farmers market (that shuts at 4:30) every day that it MUST be suitible for everyone to do and anyone who doesn't is just lazy.

They coin the derogatory term "Canners" to refer to people who still insist on using canned food (even those who don't let it get over 6 weeks old), and keep banging on about how bad tins are to the environment, conviniently ignoring the fact that most of them are aluminium these days and get recycled. These people fully support the Canera Enforcement programme as it helps their agenda.

The government's solution to people annoyed with age limits is that everyone should eat at the new semi-publically-funded Wimpy. Despite plumbing millions of money from Canera fines into Wimpy, there are still only about 15 restaurants nationwide and it still takes half an hour to get served.

The Canera's don't work that well, some people figure out that if they simply take their can, and walk down the street, then open the can in front of someone else's house, that they can continue to consume perfectly safe old tins of food with immunity from the law.

Eventually there is a case where a tin of pork&beef sausages in tomato sauce misreports it's location as being 3 houses down and a NIP is sent to a family of Hindus. The Safety Canera Partnership insist that the family provide proof that they have in fact never owned that particular can, eventually it goes to court and the court refuses their defence that their religion prohibits them from eating beef.

They are fined £1000 and lose 6 nectar points under S172 of the Food Safety Act. This case goes largely unreported. The Daily Mail runs a small piece complaining about immigrants always using their religion as a defence for their actions. The Sun picks up on the case and actually reports it accurately but unfortunately it's readership are too thick to understand what it means.

Some people start to beleive that so long as food is within date then it is fine regardless of any other factors, there are a number of deaths from people eating 2 week old raw beef with maggots crawling in it, prompting Delia Smith to launch the SafeFood campaign trying to teach people how to correctly identify food, but the majority of the British public don't pay any attention, prefering to watch ITV adverts featuring Jamie Oliver blathering on about fresh food from Sainsburys.

A further government study is carried out, introducing more caneras at Bridgend in Wales, just after they cleared up that e.coli outbreak. This study finds that deaths from food poisoning went down after the caneras were installed. Government policy continues since this new study supports their line that they are saving lives. The government recategorises fish cakes as childrens food, lowering it to 2 weeks, and starts with plans to class tinned beans as childrens food. Meanwhile Ainsley Harriott continues to grope female guests on his programme and nothing gets done about it.

And I think that is pretty much where we are up to with speed camera policy right now. Hope it amused.