Food wasting...

Have been reading the BBC news post on Brown's food wastage thing. A couple of things that don't make sense...

These two paragraphs...

A government study says the UK wastes 4m tonnes of food every year, adding £420 to a family's shopping bills.

According to the 10-month study, British families are throwing away a total of 4.1m tonnes of perfectly good food every year, costing each about £420 annually.

Firstly it seems British families throw out more good food than the entire UK actually wastes in food, 100,000 tonnes more. And if this is just some kind of error I've made reading it, there's a gaping hole in the data about spoiled food that we throw out, food that has become inedible, and is no longer perfectly good, or fit for human consumption.

Actually it would be neat to see a breakdown of food wasteage showing how much rotten food, food that's edible and past its sell by date and perfectly good food is thrown away.

Also, we used to be able to feed waste food to pigs as swill, I vaguely recall this practise was banned. So rather than being able to re-use waste food, we have to dispose of it in other ways.

Hmph, this article from May has it that we throw away 3.6m tonnes of food per year. So somehow, despite the increases in the cost of living over the past few months, we actually now throw away 500,000 tonnes more food than we did. Or possibly this 15% variance in the figures just shows how unreliable all the information available actually is.

Moving on...

The Cabinet Office report claims that up to 40% of food harvested in developing countries can be lost before it is consumed, due to the inadequacies of processing, storage and transport.

Shouldn't the developing countries and aid organisations be investing in ways to improve the processing, storage and transport infrastructure in developing countries then?

Me, I only eat tinned food. Just doing my bit.