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But the US and Canada ALONE throw out enough edible food to bring every starving person up to a level of 'poorly nourished.' And if just the nations in the European Union and China joined in, we could make them fat. That is every starving person around the globe.

I have just quoted this to my husband whose father believes that there is not enough food in the world to feed everyone.

I'm afraid this sort of thing is getting to be the norm, that and locking bins inside the supermarket or sticking it in a heavily fortified enclosure.

I use to dumpster dive about 10-15 years ago, and it was much easier then to grab stuff that was still edible/drinkable. There is still stuff out there to be liberated from the humble bin, but for me personally, it's getting difficult especially in my area.

Just a shame as there is so much GOOD stuff going in the landfill

It's awful. I watched a show about it were a guy from Oxfam said that Canada Wheat has a policy of throwing out as much as 15 to 20% of it's grain. It had something to do with GATT (General Agreement on Tarrifs and Trade) and pricing commodities by weight--basically to fix the price. They can't ship it to be consumed by others because they would then have to factor that into pricing. The grains that Canada throws out in one year would have provide 2-3 meals a day for all the people who had died from starvation in that year. Appalling : ( Don't tell me that we can't feed "those people over there" or that there is too many of them. It just makes me sick!

Big Al wrote:

Millymollymandy wrote:Ridiculous isn't it, UK supermarkets throw away perfectly good food whilst French ones leave all the fruit and veg to rot on display in the store and don't even mark it down in price.

Oooooh M&S cream cakes, don't!

This will soon be happening in the UK as the government is doing away with the best before dates and sell by dates to reduce food waste. This is a good idea to reduce the food waste but all it will do in reallity is stop the shops from marking down the food with the whoopsie yellow labels so people like myself will have to pay top price for food where as now we can make daily food choices and menus from what we can find in the bargain isles.

Perhaps the customer will be entitled to pay 'what they think it is worth' as is, I believe, your statutory right, if you are served a shoddy meal in a restaurant?

just a thought

Ben

I volunteer in a local homeless shelter which gets given loadsa food by the local Sainsbury's, so some shops do do the decent thing with their excess.

Would be poetic justice if someone ate the food with bleach on got a (minor) bad tum and sued the behind off the hideous supermarkets under some sort of health and safety stature.

It occurs to me that seeing as we're always being told that T...o and they're like work on low margins(cue small food producers getting screwed),they must be losing money hand over fist if they're wasting so much stuff...............

More to the point,there was a time when Dad and I (and most other small pig farmers)used to collect waste food from restaurants shops etc',for free,and put them in our (licenced) swill boiler.Feeding swill to pigs(the top feed for pigs incidently) was banned a few years back,when an outbreak of F&M was traced to unlicensed uncooked swill,being fed in sheds where loads of pigs cows and sheep were stored while in transit.The EU in cahoots with DEFRA,theNFU (dominated as ever by cereal growing agri-businessmen),jumped at the chance to eradicate a truly 'green' practice.........nothing in it for them,eh?

happyhippy wrote:I would of thought it was the food departments manager ordering too much food!!!!! Surely it makes more sense to possibly under order perishables,than to over order and waste money????

No, it doesn't - not to the companies: they deliberately over order (or make up too many sandwiches, sushi etc...), as if they run out, they'll lose customers, not just for that item - but people will then go somewhere else for all their shopping. That's how they reason, anyway; if you want to know more, read "Waste" by Tristram Stuart http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDi ... 42,00.html

I've read it several times already - should be compulsory reading for all - and my copy is now constantly lent out to all my friends!