While “other East African nations are considering following suit” (Nairobi feels the force of world’s most draconian plastic bag ban, 26 April), Rwanda banned plastic bags in 2008. Plastic bags can trap pools of water which host mosquitos so their ban helps fight malaria.
Alex Morton
London
• In Saturday’s Feast Ottolenghi’s tamarind recipes all call for added sugar, honey or syrup. Meera Sodha adds two tablespoons of palm sugar to her aubergines. My old-fashioned Indian recipe books don’t add sugar at all. Even the Anna Jones lettuce recipes advise a method to make them “sweet”. Is this the way to address an obese nation?
Deborah van der Beek
Chippenham, Wiltshire
• The government has proposed £50m for grammar school places (Report, 11 May). Meanwhile children in schools everywhere, whose families have no recourse to public funds, are denied free school meals. The cost per hungry child is roughly £11 per week. As a school governor, local councillor and a citizen, I am ashamed.
Cllr Zena Brabazon
Haringey, London
• I’m another one who gets turned into a nasty disease (Letters, passim); spell checkers regularly convert my name to Coeliac.
Celia Bonner
Sale, Cheshire
• Funding for brain cancer research is overdue (Report, 14 May), but a more wide-reaching memorial to Tessa Jowell would be to reverse the financial strangulation of Sure Start.
Fr Julian Dunn
Great Haseley, Oxfordshire
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