Measures to stop children from vaping could be included in forthcoming tobacco and vapes bill
Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20241005081705/https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/oct/04/vaping-to-be-banned-outside-schools-and-hospitals
They haven’t banned it, like most of these they are all ideas floated by our government, usually at a time of financial ruin or scandals to sway the national conversation towards manufactured outrage.
The ready meal (microwave dinner in US English) and meal deal (common UK grocery store deal on a drink, snack and sandwich aimed at picnickers and office workers out for a quick lunch) is the most recent of these: https://www.grocerygazette.co.uk/2023/07/28/mps-supermarket-meal-deal/
At the same time malnutrition in children is at record highs and the average height (commonly accepted as sign of economic prosperity: see S.Korea vs N.Korea) of Britons has decreased directly due to blatant cronyism and economic mismanagement through austerity measures informed by a literal typo in excel.
In the case with caffeine, this resulted in a voluntary ban of it for under-16s by the supermarkets, which is often thought to be a law but actually isn’t.
I think it is understandable though it does make it an absolute pain to purchase energy drinks because you have to be ID’d for it, store workers often don’t understand what an energy drink is because they apparently all arrived in the country yesterday, and their home country has no concept of soft drinks, or they don’t speak English, so they’re either confused by it, or they assume it is alcohol, so do the full check, even on someone who doesn’t look a day over 50.
Sorry to necro this but I wanted to thank you for your comprehensive answer to my question. It’s always fascinating to learn about this sort of weird slice of life stuff from other cultures.
Just to clarify, the cook-at-home meals they’re talking about in the article you linked are microwave meals? In the US we have some smaller grocer chains that have cook-at-home kits but they’re more like the Hello Fresh type kits. Instead of being mailed out after being packaged up in a factory or something, they’re packaged up in store so you get a package with meat from the butcher counter in store, the same asparagus at whatever the fuck as you’d get from the produce section there in store, etc. All the spices and shit you need are packaged up for you in the quantity you need, then you just steam and sauté that shit up and you have a meal in like 20 minutes without having to do any prep or anything.
Obviously we also have microwave meals in abundance.
These are microwave meals. Cook-at-home in the article just means not ready-to-eat, like your average grocery store cold sandwich with e.g. salmon and cream cheese or BLT is for instance.