Willful waste - 1 comment

'Stop wasting food', urges Brown. It's a shame people have concentrated on what this means for Britain - supposedly £8 of food being thrown away per week by the average household - rather than on this somewhat more damning statistic:

[...] up to 40% of food harvested in developing countries can be lost before it is consumed, due to the inadequacies of processing, storage and transport.

Not being able to sell their products affects the livelihoods of far more people, who have far less to live on.

It is a little ridiculous for Brown to have to ask people to change their own behaviour in order to save themselves some money. However correct the cause, Governments have to allow individuals to make their own mistakes (to remind them is embarrassing for all concerned), and to address those mistakes themselves by buying less food if the £8 is indeed worth their while saving. Besides, this wastage of food probably helps rather than hinders poor food producers, so I must declare myself neutral on this aspect (read: blind alley) of the global food debate.

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One thing that immediately struck me when reading the piece, though, was: would the Government have been brave enough to suggest that people might save money by using less petrol, or that by borrowing less they might insulate themselves from rising interest rates? People inevitably realise this and adapt accordingly, but the reaction to a politician stating it would be furious.

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Returning to food, the Conservatives miss the point as usual:

Shadow environment secretary Peter Ainsworth said government departments should set a better example.

[...] But while the government is telling households to reduce food waste it has no idea how much food it is throwing away itself. This is yet again a clear case of the government saying 'do as we say not as we do'.

Feeble. Meanwhile, Lib Dem environment spokesman, Steve Webb, blames supermarkets:

Supermarkets make it harder for householders to avoid food waste, while throwing away large quantities of edible food through poor stock management. [...]

In this era of long-life food, fridges, and freezers, and with food generally being non-addictive, the only justification for not eating food before the use-by date is either greed, or (in my case) laziness. Please credit the people with some intelligence. As for stock management, supermarkets already pay a penalty for poor decisions, by being unable to sell food they've paid for, and by having to pay for its disposal, something shoppers would otherwise have done. These feel like big enough incentives already.