Facts That Are Hard to Digest Millions Starve As We Throw Away Too Much Food
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Summary
WASTE not, want not was once a British maxim. Housewives prided themselves on spinning out the Sunday roast until Thursday and never shopped without a list. No longer. In throwaway Britain, our eyes are even bigger than our bulging bellies. We stuff our trolleys and pile our plates because, through the spectacles of affluence, food seems cheap and, therefore, disposable. A report yesterday compiled by BBC Radio 4's Costing the Earth programme found that one-third of what is grown for human consumption in the UK ends up in the bin. Each one of us discards the equivalent of [pounds]420 a year.
Nobody is arguing for a return to the days when starvation stalked our streets, but these figures are morally indefensible in a world where 850 million people are hungry and more than a billion suffer from mineral or protein deficiencies. The situation has arisen not only from rising living standards but also changes in lifestyle. The decline of the family meal, long working hours for mum as well as dad, the growth of the "grazing" culture, and children with active and unpredictable social lives all mean that careful meal planning has given way to the perpetually wellstocked fridge. Other practices, all of them questionable, aggravate our throwaway tendencies. Demands from supermarkets and EU regulations for pristine goods mean that as much as 10per cent of produce does not even get beyond the farm gate.See the full content of this document
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Facts That Are Hard to Digest Millions Starve As We Throw Away Too Much Food
Food scares have made us risk-avers...
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