THERE was a story in the Adver the other day about a grocery shop fined pretty heavily for selling stuff past its use-by date.

By coincidence the tale followed hot on the heels of the revelation that we chuck out millions of pounds’ worth of food from our cupboards because we fail to consume it in time.

This set me thinking about how we can cut down on both food waste and food spending too long on shop shelves.

I’ve concluded that nothing less than a complete rethink of labelling laws is needed, one in which food is only declared unfit for human consumption if it’s old enough to cause harm.

The beating heart of this brave new testing regime should be a hitherto criminally underused and undervalued resource: drunken blokes.

Single ones would work best, as they’re less likely to have needy dependents, but attached ones whose kids have flown the nest might be recruited at a pinch.

I suggest about three dozen working in shifts in a council building containing mock-ups of bedsits and small flats, where they’d test the foodstuffs. As drunken blokes will eat anything, the truth about what’s truly safe to eat won’t be masked by squeamishness.

Before starting a shift, each bloke should be deprived of food for several hours and issued with enough alcohol to free them of culinary inhibitions – but not so much that they pass out.

Some trial and error might be necessary to achieve the optimum level of inebriation. About two pints beyond “Yer me besht mate – I really love you, I do” should do as a base point, but any more than a single Scrumpy beyond “Oh God, why did she have to leave me?” is likely to be counterproductive, as by that point the subjects will probably be drunk enough to eat their own shoes.

All foodstuffs apart from the ones being tested should be removed from the bedsits and flats before the subjects are ushered in. The testers should have no opportunity to resort to instant noodles, say, or chip a choc-ice from the back of the freezer with a screwdriver.

I suggest each shift of testers is issued with a single type of food but in different stages of decomposition. Apples, for example, might range from slightly uncrisp through degrees of wrinkliness to: “When dropped, makes a noise a bit like a balloon when you let it go without tying the end.”

Bananas should vary from slightly speckly to: “Like a thin black sock full of lumpy custard.”

Sliced bread, rolls and such like should be tested using a similar sliding scale of ripeness, starting with slightly stale and progressing through various levels of mouldiness. The tester with the oldest example should be invited to consume a slice of bread resembling a small bottle-green carpet tile or a roll that looks like a sleeping toad.

Meat products should be issued in gradations from slightly off to very off indeed, although if a pie or sausage roll manages to sprout legs and try to run away from the tester, an official should step in to capture the thing and tie it up, ready for consumption.

 ARE you touched by the new Christmas ad for John Lewis?

It’s the one with the hare buying an alarm clock for his best friend, a bear. That way the bear’s hibernation won’t stop him from attending the annual party and exchange of presents with all the other cute woodland creatures.

Perhaps some ursine behaviourist out there will be kind enough to correct me if I’m wrong, but I was always under the impression that a bear woken from its long winter snooze is very, very hungry and very, very bad-tempered.

Perhaps there’ll be a sequel to the commercial, showing a newly-plump bear patting its stomach contentedly in an otherwise deserted forest and saying: “Beats turkey any day of the week.”