I know that the British supermarket chain Tesco has said that it is going to try to do something about it but, the revelation that in the last six months they have dumped 28,500 tons of fresh food is still rankling with me.
Maybe it was all that pious talk I remember from my childhood. Don’t waste food just think of the starving millions.
There are, to our shame, still millions of starving people in the world – mostly, like the vast amounts of food the rest of us waste, mostly the result of government and intern-governmental failure. There are, for instance, currently two million refugees from Syria’s civil war who are struggling to survive.
Is it not time for us to put these two facts together and did something about it? It’s not just Tesco, it’s the rest of us too – we who have have got just too careless with our food…we who are still lucky enough to be fussy about what we eat and cavalier about what we leave on the side of the plate. Are we still going to allow this disparity to continue?
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My novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, is published on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.
…or from Amazon:
In the US we are beginning to address this shameful problem through organizations such as Second Harvest that collect good, usable food from groceries and restaurants before it's tossed into dumpsters. It's then redistributed to homeless shelters and food banks that feed the needy.
That sounds like a good idea Patricia – a good way of dealing with the consequences of Western greed though.