SERIAL shoplifter Angela Palmer, who was trying to kick a drug habit, stole to eat and not to pay a dealer, a court heard yesterday.

Palmer, 27, was arrested as she left a Harrogate supermarket with pasta, a cook-in sauce, mushrooms, a pie and yoghurt valued at a total of £5.29, Simon Ostler, prosecuting, told Harrogate magistrates.

He said Palmer, of Robert Street, Harrogate, had been seen putting the goods into a carrier bag and a store detective had been waiting for her outside the store.

Palmer pleaded guilty to the theft and agreed it put her in breach of a conditional discharge imposed in March after she admitted the theft of electric tooth brushes worth £199.98, which she had dropped in a struggle with security staff who chased her as she fled from the store.

She admitted breaching a community rehabilitation order, also imposed in March, for two shoplifting offences, and was made the subject of a six-month order with £50 costs. Geoffrey Rogers, defending, said Palmer was trying to kick her heroin habit and had been prescribed methadone as a substitute.

He said: "It is helping her to keep off illegal drugs and she is finding life a lot better than it has been for some considerable time. There is clearly a lot of work still to be done, but she is making progress."

Mr Rogers said the latest theft, unlike many in the past, had not been to pay for drugs but had been to obtain something to eat.