Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d commit to paper: I’m with Theresa May. Not on her politics, but with her cavalier approach to jam. When she was PM, she revealed to ministers during a Cabinet discussion on food waste that she scrapes the mould off the top of old jam and finds the rest “perfectly edible”. I can’t conceive of doing otherwise: I grew up with a father who would cut the mould out of fruit and took a sniff-it-and-see approach to milk and butter. Today, the edibility of eggs long after their ‘best before’ date are the hill I choose to die on, while my boyfriend attempts to pry them from my hands.
The jury may have decided on our former prime minister – but it’s still out on jam mould. When May’s spreadable story broke last year, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) advised that food obviously containing mould should not be eaten. A professor of bacteriology on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme countered, saying that he too would scrape off surface mould “depending on the quality of the jam”.