Parents of all people know the importance of food. Nothing infuriates them more than seeing leftover food on their kids’ plates and seeing perfectly good food having been left to rot.
That is because millions of people die everyday of starvation and malnutrition. This has been a problem for centuries, and now, finally, more and more governments are doing something to address it.
A recent law has been passed forbidding supermarkets to waste unsold food, forcing them to donate it instead to charities and food banks.
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“Under a law passed unanimously by the French senate, as of Wednesday large shops will no longer bin good quality food approaching its best-before date,” reports say. “Charities will be able to give out millions more free meals each year to people struggling to afford to eat.”
Now campaigners from all over Europe hope that the rest of the European union will follow suit and adopt a similar law.
Reports also say that supermarkets will also be barred from deliberately spoiling food in order to stop it being eaten by people foraging in stores’ bins.
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Growing numbers of families, students, and homeless people in recent years have been resorting to foraging in supermarket bins at night to feed themselves. And they have been finding edible products thrown out just as their best-before dates approached.
“Most importantly, because supermarkets will be obliged to sign a donation deal with charities, we’ll be able to increase the quality and diversity of food we get and distribute,” said Jacques Bailet, head of Banques Alimentaires, a network of French food banks.
Of the 7.1m tones of food wasted in France annually, 67% is binned by consumers, 15% by restaurants and 11% by shops. Each year 1.3 billion tons of food are wasted worldwide.
That is a staggering figure. Now imagine if all of the developed countries adopted the same law. Imagine if all that wasted food could be given out to the starving all over the world.
How about you, moms? How do you make sure that you limit the leftover in your homes, and whenever you do have some leftovers, what do you do with them?
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