Shops should give £800m of waste food to needy, urges MSP

Published on Friday 2 January 2009 21:57

SUPERMARKETS should make greater efforts to hand out unsold food to the hungry, a Scottish politician has urged.

Liberal Democrat Mike Pringle has asked the stores, and the Scottish Government, to back a charity campaign to distribute excess food.

The FareShare campaign distributed food for 4.5 million people across the UK in 2007.

Mr Pringle, the MSP for Edinburgh South, said the Scottish Government was committed to recycling 70 per cent of the country's wasted food by 2025.

The sandwich chain, Pret A Manger, gives away its unused food to the needy at the end of the working day.

But Scotland threw away 800 million worth of food in a year, much of which went to landfill, he said.

"I'm calling on the government, supermarkets and businesses to back FareShare this festive season and for the coming year, to help those in food poverty," said Mr Pringle,

Carol-Anne Alcorn, project manager of Cyrenians FareShare campaign in Edinburgh and Lothians, said: "Redistributing food is a win-win solution for the disadvantaged and the environment – it not only helps the needy but reduces the volume of waste going to landfill and helps reduce emissions.

"Thousands of people across Scotland live in food poverty all year round and the food we provide makes a real difference. No good food should be wasted this year."

A Scottish Government spokeswoman said: "As part of Scotland's first ever national food and drink policy, we now have supermarkets working with us on a range of issues including access to affordable, healthy food for everyone in Scotland.

"We are also already working with charities who do excellent work distributing unsold supermarket food to those in need."

A spokeswoman for Asda said that they would look into the issue.

"Certainly, we welcome any scheme to help those in need, and we will look at Mr Pringle's comments and the FareShare project to see how we can help," she said.

The spokeswoman added that Asda was already doing everything possible to reduce the amount of waste food produced by its shops.

A spokesman for Tesco said of the politician's comments: "Tesco has been donating food to FareShare, from stores across the country, for many years now."

The practice of using excess food has gained ground in recent years among so called "Freegans", who salvage discarded food from supermarket bins.

Their website claims: "There is more food thrown out in the UK than there are hungry people to eat it. The irony of the suggestion that food be donated to charities, is that often the charities themselves are forced to throw away food, because they are given more than they can effectively redistribute."

Critics have also criticised the "obsession" of retailers with unblemished produce. That forces farmers to discard crops because they fail supermarket "blemish tests".

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THE Freegan movement, which encourages the raiding of large supermarket bins for discarded food, claims it is a part of broader ethical approach to life, a way of living simply, reducing members' consumption and the pressure they place on the environment.

Freegans say that much of the food discarded by supermarkets is done so for many reasons, often not just because it is rotten. Reasons for throwing away food include the packaging being damaged, part of a case of food being spoiled, the food is nearing its sell-by date or did not sell quickly enough before a fresh shipment arrived.

The movement claims that while it could be seen as theft or trespass, nobody has ever been charged for raiding supermarket bins.