Knock, knock. Who’s there...?

As the UK tumbles further into recession, the government is hard at work shovelling money to ventures like this:

In an initial seven-week trial, eight officials will call at 24,500 homes, dishing out advice and recipes. The officials, each of whom has received a day's training, will paid up to £8.49 an hour, with a bonus for working on Saturdays.

And the purpose of this scheme?

To teach granny to suck eggs cook for the family...

Home cooks will also be told what size portions to prepare, taught to understand "best before" dates and urged to make more use of their freezers.

The door-to-door campaign, which starts tomorrow, will be funded by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) , a Government agency charged with reducing household waste.

Oh, we’ve seen these jokers before, I think.

Tim Worstall has rubbished their claims before. They are the publicly-funded group that claims potato peelings and tea bags as ‘food waste’. So I don’t think I’ll be taking their advice on what to cook should they be unfortunate enough to knock on my door!

Needless to say, the prospect of being able to knock on doors and tell the proles what to eat and how to cook it already has the Righteous salivating:

The pilot scheme, which will cost £30,000, could be extended nationwide if it is seen as a success.

If all 25 million households in the UK were visited in the same way, 8,000 officials would be required at a cost of tens of millions of pounds.

Just what we need! An army of busybodies to come and knock on our doors to tell us the blindingly obvious. And if we don’t want to open those doors, perhaps they’ll be granted the right of entry, like these people....

Peter Ainsworth, the shadow environment secretary, said: "You might have thought, at a time of economic hardship, that spending public money on stating the obvious is hardly a priority. With household budgets under pressure, most people are looking to spend wisely and waste less anyway."

Yes, Peter, but we can’t leave it up to people to do as they please, can we?

Local councillors have already questioned the project. Fran Oborski, a councillor in Wyre Forest, Worcestershire, said: "Although this will create jobs in a time of recession, I would have thought that there are far more important things for people to be doing."

Me too....

Needless to say, the Righteous are unrepentant:

Julia Falcon, from WRAP, said: "A number of councils want to support our Love Food Hate Waste campaign. We selected Herefordshire and Worcestershire to test the door-to-door aspect. We want to test it thoroughly and get feedback. In the scheme of things, this is a fairly modest cost to the taxpayer to test this approach.

"There is a benefit to residents, because if they can cut back on what they throw in the bin, they will make a personal saving. A lot of the advice seems common sense but our research has shown that not everyone heeds it. People are confused by date labels and end up throwing out food while it is still in date."

There, you see. Not everyone heeds common sense ideas, so by God, we’ll find a way to make ‘em do it, even if it hurts...

Tim Burns, from Waste Watch - the contractor carrying out the scheme for WRAP - said: "Food waste has such a high impact on climate change and it is something we can all do something about."

He defended the amount of paper that would be used by the 24,500 leaflets produced by the scheme.

"The small booklet gives a range of tips and signposts the campaign website to get more information. If the leaflet helps residents reduce their waste, that is a lot better for the environment."

What would be a lot better for the environment would be for you and your organisation, and the publicly-funded quango that is feeding you our money hand over fist, to be buried in landfill.