Do you know the difference between ‘Best Before’ and ‘Sell By’? ‘Display Until’ and ‘Use By’?

Many of us don't, and it’s causing a whopping ten per cent of Europe’s food waste - 9,000,000 tonnes across Europe each year.

The QR-code menu—which you access by scanning a black-and-white square with your smartphone—has taken off ever since. It may dominate going forward. But I hope not, because I detest those digital menus. Never mind dying peacefully in my sleep; I want to go out while sitting in a restaurant on my 100th birthday, an aperitif in my left hand and a paper menu in my right. And as eager as I’ll be for heaven if I’m lucky enough to stand on its threshold, I want one last downward glance at a paramedic prying the menu from my fist. In that better future, where old-school menus endure, I’ll go to my urn happy that coming generations will still begin meals meeting one another’s eyes across a table instead of staring at a screen.

Every single restaurant in Singapore uses these terrible, crappy UI, QR code menus. They suck. It's time for them to die in a fire. The pandemic is over and there's no reason for them to be used.

I need to use my phone, I can't easily discuss with my party on who is ordering what by showing and sharing a menu, the internet often sucks, and the page fails to load (or takes forever), the UI is broken on a tiny screen (text/ingredients are not fully shown, impossible to scan through a one-pager with 100s of items), some restaurants explicitly ask you to order only from one phone (imagine having two phones ordering food! Nuclear disaster!!) and some of those apps/sites clear the cart when going "back" in the browser, and each have their own, terrible, UI built differently taking forever to figure it out).

Even worse are those menus where you need to fill in your credit card to pre-pay (god forbid using Apple/Google Pay) that block copying and pasting numbers (out of 1password) or clear the input field every time you tab out of the browser and for example into 1password). AAAARGGHHH.

For now, we can't escape them, but I will happily get out of my way to avoid a restaurant that uses QR codes and get into one that provides a proper menu.