“Supermarkets in France have been banned from destroying unsold food in a bid to
tackle the country's massive £14bn-worth of annual waste.
The French parliament passed a new law obliging the food retail giants to
give any excess to charities or for other use.
Mr Garot said: “It’s scandalous to see bleach being poured into supermarket dustbins along with edible foods."
The legislation prevents supermarkets deliberately spoiling unsold food so it
can't be eaten, the Guardian reports.” - http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/france-bans-supermarkets-destroying-unsold-5742304
My first thought when reading this was why this was not done before? We are now in 2015 with more than half the world living in poverty. A very large amount of Perfectly edible food is thrown away – almost half the food that is produced in this world is thrown away.
It is a fact that the world produces enough food to feed every human being – yet millions die each year because of malnutrition. Making it a law to have supermarkets and big chains not have their leftover food thrown away is a great step forward. Now is it time for every supermarket in the world to follow this trend.
But there is another dark side to this and that is the reason why we have hungry people and food being wasted. And it’s simple – with half the world in poverty they cannot afford to BUY the food. Currently we rely on charities to feed the people. How to solve this?
With a Living Income Guaranteed where the people who before could not afford to buy food no have the money to do so. If we look at it globally with more than half the world unable to afford basic needs and now with the Living Income Guaranteed they are finally able to buy food and afford basic needs – this alone would greatly reduce the food being wasted currently. This would stop the dependency on charities as well by giving people purchasing power and would also be a huge boost in income for supermarkets.
We produce enough food to provide every person on Earth with 2,700 calories per day. Yet 842 million people still go to bed hungry– let’s stop this with LIG.
Food waste is a lose-lose situation for the environment, the struggling families in today’s tough economy and for the food retailers.
ReplyDeleteFortunately, there are new ways to avoid unsold food waste.
The new open GS1 DataBar barcode standard enables new food waste reduction applications that offer relevant, environmentally friendly and personalized fresh food deals.
An example of such an application is the “End Grocery Waste” App. This GS1 DataBar based application encourages efficient consumer shopping behavior that makes fresh food affordable for all families, maximizes grocery retailer revenue, and effectively reduces the global carbon footprint.