‘Lost food’ banquet for les miserables

A BILL has been tabled by a group of French MPs to compel supermarkets to hand over all unsold food still fit for consumption to charity.

Many supermarket chains in France already donate unsold produce to charities, but 63 MPs from across the political spectrum would like to see the practice enshrined in law.

Late last month, they tabled a bill making it compulsory for supermarkets with 1 000m² of floor space to give their “unsold but still consumable food products to at least one food charity”.

Belgium became the first European country to introduce such a law in May. The move followed proposals by the European Union to scrap compulsory “best before” labels on coffee, rice, dry pasta, hard cheeses, jams and pickles to help reduce the estimated 100 million tons of food wasted in Europe every year.

The French MPs believe that, despite a “national pact against food wastage” launched in the country last year, measures preventing still-edible food being thrown away are “insufficient”.

They cited a World Food Organisation estimate that a third of food products still fit for human consumption were “lost or wasted”.

The MPs said they were targeting larger food chains as their “logistics and important stock” made it easier for them to organise donations.

In France alone, each supermarket produces 200 tons of waste a year.

The French throw away between 20kg and 30kg of food each year, 7kg of which is unopened when it hits the rubbish bin — representing an estimated à400 (about R5 800) of wasted food per home.

Charities may face financial strain having to buy storage facilities

Supermarkets in France already hand over large quantities of unsold food to charity.

The Secours Populaire charity group said that half of the meals it distributed to poor people last year came from big food stores.

Gaëtan Lassale, head of the French federation of food banks, welcomed the proposal, saying: “Donations already work well in France thanks to tax-break incentives, but this is a good thing as it will enable us to gather even more unsold produce.”

Lassale told Le Journal du Dimanche that the proposal would put charities under financial strain because they would be forced to invest in “cold storage, refrigerated lorries or hangars” to store the food. “Who will pay?”

Officials of the European Commission recently tabled proposals to allow national governments to extend the list of foods that do not require best-before dates in a move they say will mean 15 million tons less food a year is thrown away by households in the erroneous belief that it is no longer fit for consumption. — © The Daily Telegraph