Buying food

You can buy food in three main ways:

• Packaged food with a marked weight or volume
• Loose weighed food
• Countable items

Packaged food

The majority of food sold in supermarkets is packaged:

This category includes:

• All tinned food
• Food in cardboard packages such as breakfast cereals, crackers, biscuits
• Food in plastic containers such as margarine, yogurt, cream, cottage cheese and salt
• Food in jars such as jams, honey and pickles
• Food wrapped in paper, plastic or foil such as butter, cheese and cold meat
• Drink in bottles like milk, soft drinks, water, wine and beer
• Other bottled items such as cooking oil

Most packages and containers have standardised on sensible metric sizes. Typically these are expressed either as net weight or net volume. Since 1995 it has been compulsory to label these quantities in metric units. Examples are given in the table below.

Food	Common or standard sizes
Bread	400 g, 800 g
Breakfast cereal	350 g, 375 g, 500 g, 600 g, 750 g, 1 kg
Butter	250 g, 500 g
Cooking Oil	250 mL, 500 mL, 750 mL, 1 L, 2 L, 3 L
Flour	500 g, 1 kg
Margerine	250 g, 500 g, 1 kg
Pasta	500 g, 1 kg
Rice	500 g, 1 kg, 2 kg, 5 kg, 10 kg
Sugar	250 g, 500 g, 1 kg
Yogurt	150 g, 500 g

In a few cases there are some awkward hangovers from imperial such as the size of some milk containers and jam pots. Standard pack sizes work very well with your modern metric recipes that use quantities in round numbers of grams or millilitres.

Loose weighed food

Loose weighed food is commonplace at the greengrocer, the butcher, the fishmonger or at the delicatessen counter. This is therefore mainly fruit, vegetables, fresh meat, fresh fish, cold meats, cheeses and ready-made salads.

In market stalls, butchers and fishmongers, the trader will usually pick, weigh and package the goods for you. In supermarkets and self-service greengrocers, you pick the fruit or vegetables required and they will be weighed for you at the checkout. Since 2000 it has been compulsory to use metric weighing equipment and to specify a metric unit price.

Countable items

Some loose fruit, vegetables and other goods such as garlic may be priced on a countable basis. Thus you may find, for example, garlic priced at ’45 p each’ as opposed to a kilogram unit price.