This blog’s second is already not about Hong Kong, at least not directly so.
Headline: Whole Earth peanut butter recalled from supermarkets for not displaying ‘contains nuts’ warning
Everyone in the UK (apart from bureaucrats and other killjoys) is already making fun of this incident, but of course they’re not actually going to do anything about it. (Unmentioned in the article is that peanuts are not nuts). Food labelling in Hong Kong is basic, and already a waste of time and resources.
But what made me post this was the following paragraph in the article, with emphasis very much added:
Peanuts are a common cause of food allergy, caused when the immune system reacts to the protein found in the nuts. Peanut allergies affect about 2 per cent of children in the UK – the equivalent of one in 50 – and has been increasing in recent decades.
While this has benefit of being technically correct, and therefore the best kind of correct, it should also go without saying, especially if it’s not considered important to point out that peanuts are not, technically, nuts.
It seems that the opinion amongst those who deem themselves the UK’s elites that Maths Is Hard and that there’s no shame in not understanding what 2% means has gotten even worse in the last decade; while it was de rigeur to proudly proclaim at dinner parties that “one is terrible with numbers”, as though they are in equal parts specialised and useless, I’m quite sure a major broadsheet newspaper like The Telegraph wouldn’t acknowledge that thinking so explicitly. I don’t think there is a single person in Hong Kong, of any educational level, who can’t parse percentages as well as they parse food they’ve chewed in their mouths, and certainly no-one who would admit it without a sense of deep shame. How long can this malign form of Idiocracy be tolerated in the UK? But of course it’s a symptom of upper class pride in not being good with money or other earthly skills, so perhaps only an exploding debt or asset price bubble will change this.