The pre-peeled potato has arrived at our local supermarket, the perfect product for those people just too busy to spend the 40 seconds it takes to peel a couple of spuds.

I wonder what they do with the 40 seconds they save? Read Proust? Train for the Olympic squad? Knock out a few pelvic floor exercises?

The potato, you might notice, comes equipped with its own packaging but, since this has been removed, a substitute plastic packaging must be added, the potatoes sitting nude and glistening in their presentation tub, another sheet of plastic draped over the top like a see-through Doona.

Since the aim seems to be a perpetual increase in packaging, I assume we'll soon end up with individual potatoes, each sitting on a sort of faux-velvet throw rug, to be viewed through a heart-shaped window, with built-in lighting and humidifiers.

On radio this week I was mildly critical of this development, only to receive a blistering text message in response. A chap with "crippling arthritis" said the product was a blessing for those unable to use a peeler and I should take a good look at myself for being so critical.

Fair enough but for some minutes I was distracted, trying to work out how he'd managed to be so instantly dextrous with a mobile phone keyboard - something I find almost impossible to use - and yet so defeated by a potato peeler. I conjured up an image of his twisted hands, the fingers jabbing angrily down on the keys, and decided it was, indeed, possible.

Angry jabbing may well be easier than sideways peeling, requiring, as the latter does, pressure to be exerted sideways between the thumb and the forefinger. Once I have arthritis in my hands - instead of just everywhere else - I'll conduct an experiment and report back.

What I don't understand is why my arthritic mate thinks the plastic is going to be that easy to open. I find most plastic packaging impossible to break into.

Once, on a Qantas flight, I had a battle with a packet of peanuts all the way from Sydney to Melbourne. The packet won.

Most of Australia's dental injuries are suffered by people attempting to gnaw their way into a bag of Burger Rings or to breach the security cordon that is a Tim Tams packet. If they really wanted to protect the Green Zone in Baghdad they'd get Arnott's in.

Plastic, in other words, is a terrible form of packaging. It wrecks the environment, makes food sweat, requires all sorts of chemicals to be added to stop the food turning grey and you can't even get into it.

That's why it's so frustrating to see its triumphant march through the fruit and veg sections, all within the past four or five years.

Five years ago, lettuces were triumphant. Most of the vegetable section consisted of lettuce. It sat in tall, majestic pyramids reminiscent of those at Giza. Now, just a few years on, the lettuces cower in a single, sad pile, while bags of pre-packed leaves luxuriate in a refrigerated unit, spread along one whole wall. The bags, I note, are suitably puffed up, no doubt due to the speed of their conquest.

The apples are hanging on but they, too, are now under challenge: a new product offers the convenience of pre-sliced apples, nestling in a plastic bag. Presumably this is for people who have both arthritic hands and arthritic teeth and are therefore unable to either bite into an apple or cut the damn thing up.

What's so maddening is our inability to take pleasure in the packaging provided by nature. If bananas were grown nude, you can imagine someone inventing a form of packaging called "the banana skin". "It protects the banana inside," the inventors would tell an astonished Nobel Prize committee, "is firm to the touch and possesses a unique cellular structure that allows the fruit to continue its process of ripening - all as it sits there in the fruit bowl."

Even more remarkable, this outer Techno-Skin (TM) changes colour, from green to yellow, to indicate when the fruit is ripe and ready to eat. Wow. You'd pay extra for that.

And even better, it can be discarded and thence used as a prop in slapstick comedy.

As usual, we don't know how lucky we are and so the striptease continues: the carrot, the potato and the apple all stripped of their perfectly good clothes and re-dressed in synthetics. Even garlic, I noticed the other day, is now available by the bag, the cloves separated and peeled.

Am I the only one who likes his knob properly covered? Think of the garlic and the pure indignity of it.

T. S. Eliot once asked the question: "Do I dare to eat a peach?", the answer to which is now: "Only if peeled, sliced, bagged and poisoned and sold at a price per kilo double that of an ordinary peach."

This, I suppose, is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a weirdness.

Richard Glover is a writer and broadcaster. This article first appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald.