Bin divers

[d000hg]

This is a fun piece to share, since I've know the people running it since my student days:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeands...upermarket-bin

And yes they literally did used to go climbing into actual bins But from seeing it first hand, what they do is really great and food wastage is genuinely ridiculous.

[ladymuck]

That's pretty cool, to know you've effected a decent level of change in that way.

Whilst households are regularly lambasted for their levels of food waste, the supermarkets are just as bad. The other 'scandal' is the supermarket's claim that the public only want perfect fruit and veg, forcing farmers to dump loads of less than perfect stock. The meagre bags of 'wonky veg' you occasionally see are just paying lip service to solving the problem.

[SueEllen]

Sainsburys and Morrisons have been selling class 2 veg for a while now. I managed to get a large bag of avocados from Morrisons for a couple a quid a few times. I didn't notice it was odd shaped until I got it home. However with some of the veg the price isn't cheaper so why are you going to buy it?

[ladymuck]

Unless you need to present the food in a particular way, once the veg is chopped up it looks and tastes exactly the same so why should it be cheaper? It costs the same to produce.

[d000hg]

Unless you need to present the food in a particular way, once the veg is chopped up it looks and tastes exactly the same so why should it be cheaper? It costs the same to produce.

Market forces. If they sell both side by side for the same price, everyone will take the pretty ones.

[ladymuck]

Market forces. If they sell both side by side for the same price, everyone will take the pretty ones.

Because we've all been told that food has to be pretty and only cheap people eat wonky food. It's all effed up in my view.

[d000hg]

Because we've all been told that food has to be pretty and only cheap people eat wonky food. It's all effed up in my view.

I'd rather buy a beautiful straight carrot than 2 weird wonky ones, easier to peel.

[northernladuk]

As a cheeky apprentice I spent many a happy hour gaffa tapped up in the canteen food waste skip over lunchtime back in the days where the H&S officer was one of the people applying said gaffa tape and helping hoist me in the skip.. ah the good old days, but I digress. The amount of food wasted from the canteen alone was an eye opener. So if the supermarket wastes, X amount of food, the restaurants waste Y and the customer wastes Z by not eating it all I'd love to know what X+Y+Z is as a percentage of the food produced. We must only actually consume a surprising low amount of what is actually produced.

[ladymuck]

...So if the supermarket wastes, X amount of food, the restaurants waste Y and the customer wastes Z by not eating it all I'd love to know what X+Y+Z is as a percentage of the food produced. We must only actually consume a surprising low amount of what is actually produced.

In theory, no-one should be going hungry and no-one should be struggling to eat good food as there's plenty enough to go around. Sadly, a combination of fear of litigation and greed means food gets chucked rather than distributed.

[d000hg]

What we've seen from knowing the people in the story is that while a lot of supermarket 'rubbish' is stuff with only a day or two left on the use-by date, they also throw loads away that has weeks or even months left. Frequently high-end stuff.

We subscribe to their "waste not" box which started off as a weekly grocery box - mainly fruit and veg - these days we often get steak, Pasta Evangelist, Gu desserts. I think they do hundreds of these boxes a week plus catering plus feeding the homeless plus running a cafe... and all from free stuff.