Health and Safety gone mad.

It has been a wonderful day weatherwise, wall to wall sunshine with an autumnal chill in the air. Keith and I thought we would take a walk down in to Stone, to have our usual look around the charity shops. We found another ribbon dish for our back cabin which is always nice, this one is A Present from Llandudno. Having been around all of the shops, I wanted to buy some beetroot from the veg shop to add to a crumble. I know sounds daft, but bare with me on this one. This shop does cook your own with leaves and root still on, or you can buy it already cooked. I chose the pre-cooked one, now normally in the box there would be a pair on tonges to pic up the beetroot, but they were missing. So I asked the lady behind the till if she had the tonges. Her reply totally stunned me. She said "Sorry my dear, we cannot use the tonges anymore, due to health and safety. They say there is a risk of cross contamination".My reply was " Your joking aren't you". It seemed that she was not joking, they have been told they can no longer use tongs, they now have to use plastic bags to handle the beetroot. So ok we avoid the possible risk of cross contamination, but we polute the enviroment with more disused plastic bags. Where the hell is the sense in that?
This health and safety lark really is out of hand big time. Soon they will be asking us to use disinfectant hand wash before handling the veg.
How on earth did the older generation ever survive I wonder without all this nonsense?

Now I know your wondering about Beetroot in a crumble. Well I got the idea from the TV program River Cottage Autumn, with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. He made a Beetroot and Apple crumble. I have already stewed the apples. We will be giving it a try for pudding tonight. Next on my list of things to try are the Chocolate and Beetroot Brownies.
Watch this space.