PUNISHING THE "WASTERS"-A NEW APPROACH FOR WASTE REDUCTION

On one side over eating is sought to be discouraged because of the fear of obesity and all consequences associated with this body bloating syndrome. On the other hand many people waste food by not eating all they cook or buy due to many reasons and this is also a global issue of serious concern because almost one billion poor people in this Globe go to bed hungry every night! How can one bring about a balance under such a predicament faced by many nations, especially the ones which are wealthy? There are institutions like Food Banks in some countries which are active in making use of foods that are discarded while many non-government voluntary bodies are actively engaged in utilizing such foods to feed the poor. It is against such a background that the new initiative by a few eateries in some parts of the world to punish those indulging in food wastage, are to be appreciated. Here is a report which highlights such a practice on the part of a few courageous restaurants in some countries. 

A restaurant in Saudi Arabia is making headlines for its unusual policy of penalizing customers for 'wastage of food.' According to the owner of the restaurant based in Dammam, in the Eastern Province, the penalty was put into place after many customers failed to consume their large orders of food—the owners stress wasting food goes against the teachings of Islam. In a culture of excess, a 'food wastage' policy may sound absurd, but this isn't the first time a restaurant has opted for this kind of a penalty. Consider the £20 (Dh114) fee owners of the Chinese restaurant Kylin Buffet charge those diners who do not eat all the food of their plates. The restaurant's policy received much coverage after they fined Beverley Clark, a 40-year-old mother, after her son and niece left two onion rings, a prawn toast and a spring roll at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Or consider the standing policy in a Japanese restaurant in New York called Hayashi Ya which fines a customer 3 percent of their bill, if they do not finish what they serve themselves from the all-you-can-eat buffet. Other restaurants opt for forms of positive reinforcement to encourage good eating habits. A Japanese restaurant called Wafu just outside of Sydney, Australia, gives its customers a 30 percent discount if they eat all the food they ordered. The company's website begins with a special plea to its customers to: "Please be mindful of the amount of food you order – consider ordering just the right amount, in harmony with your appetite!" Food wastage fines isn't altogether a strange concept—but Kipp can't help but think it would be very strange if it was every enforced here in the Emirates. After all, for a city like Dubai which has given birth to the institution of the Friday all-you-can-eat-and-drink brunch, it is difficult to think of such penalties being put in place. Yet given the country's burgeoning obesity problem, perhaps a food wastage fee is exactly what is needed.


The initiative of these pioneers deserves kudos because they are swimming against the tide trying to establish and disseminate the bitter truth that wasting food is a social crime. It may difficult for these players to compete with conventional eateries where jumbo sizes and ad libitum food are the norms. Modern marketing mania depends largely on attracting customers using economic parameters, with low prices and large serving sizes ruling in the market place. The New York "rumblings" in the name of a proposed policy by the authorities to ban sale of jumbo size sugar laden beverages there, is a classical example of the dominance of quantity over quality! Probably the restaurants which impose fines for wastage or encourages lesser wastage through hefty discounts in the bills, have full confidence in the quality of their offerings and expect their customers to come back again even under such an environment. They do serve as a focal point to convey a vital message that "eat as much as you want but do not waste"!  

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com

UNCONSCIONABLE WASTE OF FOODS IN INDIA-A NO-WIN SITUATION?

Food wastage is a global phenomenon taking place in almost all countries in the world. Only difference is the extent of wastage occurring in each country. While pre-harvest and post-harvest losses can be substantial and national efforts are called for to reduce the same, at individual level precious foods are thrown away because rich people can afford to do so. In spite of exhortation and frequent awareness campaigns by the governments, wastage continues unabated. Rich and super rich people with wads of money to throw around and to show their status in the society indulge in organizing lavish feasts attended by hundreds if not thousands of invitees. Obviously such mass organized feeding can create surpluses of foods which can deteriorate very fast and same is thrown away, making it an environmental nuisance. Though India cannot be billed as a nation with unlimited wealth, enormous wastage does take place, especially in metropolitan cities and small towns, the culprits being mainly business men, industrialists, politicians and bureaucrats. A recent report of such an episode clearly brings out the dimension of this societal scourge in the country.

"When the daughter of businessman Mohammed Sultan got married recently, guests were treated to a lavish 30-course meal served in super-sized silver platters. The Kashmiri feast, prepared by an army of chefs, included more than 20 meat and kebab dishes rich with spices to go with the saffron-flavored rice and naan breads. Hours later, after the more than 500 guests had eaten their fill, the leftovers were dumped by the cartload at a nearby garbage site. As the ranks of India's wealthy surge with rapid economic growth, many families are staging extravagant displays of food at their children's weddings to show off their new found affluence. The prodigious waste that follows has horrified many in a nation where food prices are skyrocketing and tens of millions of young children are malnourished. At the recent wedding of the son of a ruling party leader, more than a 100 dishes representing Thai, Chinese, Mediterranean and Indian cuisines were served to over 30,000 guests. About 20 percent would've been thrown away. India's Food Minister KV Thomas wants to curtail what has become known as the Big Fat Indian Wedding. He says about one-fifth of the food served at weddings and social gatherings is discarded. "It's a criminal waste," Thomas said. The tons of food wasted at social gatherings across the country each day contrasts sharply with the food shortages, often bordering on chronic starvation, faced by millions of poor Indians. Like elsewhere in Asia, food prices in India are rising fast - by 8.4 percent in June alone - as demand outstrips production. And the burden is falling disproportionately on the poor. Experts say the jump in prices for staples to record highs over the past few months has pushed another 64 million Asians into poverty. According to the food minister, around 100,000 weddings and social events are held in India every day. He says food wasted each day at weddings and family functions in Mumbai alone would be enough to feed the city's vast slum population".

Though GOI showed its concern at such wastage of precious foods, there is very little it has done during the last 3 decades. The Guest Control Order which was in force once upon a time died a natural death because of slack implementation by a government with no political will. Sudden concern shown by the junior Food Minister of GOI may be another passing event and it is sure that nothing much will come out of it. If the country really wants to tackle this problem, a totally different approach is called for. The example in some countries like the US, Canada, Australia etc in creating Food Banks to save the excess prepared foods and utilizing the same for feeding the needy must be emulated. The necessary infrastructure required for collecting the food promptly, preserving them immediately and supplying to designated feeding centers must be created. It can be either the government itself or designated NGOs supported by the government which can shoulder such a noble program.

V.H.POTTY http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/ http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com

"DATE EXPIRED" FOODS - PUTTING THEM TO BETTER USE

What to do with date expired packed foods is an issue that has been debated for long ever since the present front of the pack labeling provision became mandatory in many countries. While manufacturers have the moral and legal responsibility to with draw such products and replace with fresh packs in the retail market shelves, some highly popular brands, in great demand, do not extend this service to its retailers. Probably retailers who depend on these products heavily to sustain their business have no choice but to allow them being wasted or adopt the dubious practice of repacking them to hoodwink the consumer. Therefore the problem becomes more of the retailer than that of the manufacturer. It was no long ago a Minister in the British Cabinet exhorted the consumers there not to waste the date-expired foods by throwing them away. It is rarely understood that expiry date often refers to the eating quality of the contents rather than their safety. Still consumers have a tendency to prefer food products with long expiry date, imagining rightly or wrongly, that they are much safer and of course they cannot be faulted. If the manufacturers are able to give same date information with respect to safety, lot of foods could be saved from going waste which is an inexcusable act considering the fate of millions of people who go hungry every day for want of access to affordable food. The Food Bank movement which has taken roots in many developed country are doing a yeoman service by redeeming date expired foods and distributing the same to poor people, after ascertaining they are safe. Those who work in this movement are "Angels" in this, other wise despicable, planet!

"According to Kate Mudge, the director of Food Rescue, almost every retailer in the Twin Cities participates. "It doesn't cost anything to participate, if anything it saves money from trash collection," she said. Companies also have tax incentives for participating. Major retailers include Cub Foods, Sam's Club, Wal-Mart and Byerly's, along with many other food sellers. The program has existed since 1984, but has taken off in the last five years. Similar programs exist across the country, but according to Mudge, this is one of the more formalized organizations. Food Rescue has eight refrigerator trucks in the metro collecting food from stores daily, and it is one of the largest programs of its kind in the country. Though the eight trucks run in the Twin Cities area, they also set up connections between stores and food shelves in rural areas. Food Rescue is completely safe and protected by federal law under the Good Samaritan Act. The program also offers a way for retailers to be green and increase sustainability efforts. Working with 224 donors across Minnesota and Wisconsin, they collected and saved around 12 million pounds in 2010. Second Harvest Heartland collects a total of 60 million pounds of food and year, with nearly 25 percent coming from Food Rescue. With the program still growing, they hope to collect 15 million pounds this year. The largest of their kind in the Upper Midwest, Second Harvest Heartland says on their website that they wish to relieve hunger through leadership and innovation. They are also a member of "Feeding America," a network of more than 200 food banks across the country. Collecting, storing, and distributing millions of pounds of food to those in need are the main goals of the organization. This innovative process of distributing food has a way to take what would end up being unnecessary landfill contents and feeding those who need it. Manufacturers refuse to let this food go to waste, and Food Rescue helps to make sure that doesn't happen".

A recent news item in print media in India claimed that GOI is "considering" the waste of foods in the country though the bland statement by a junior minister in the Parliament does not say where food is wasted and how they are going to be prevented. It took 64 long years after Independence for the "ruling elite" to realize "food is wasted" in large quantities in the country! This is while no less an agency like the Supreme Court indicted the very same government regarding its propensity to allow food grains to rot out side their storage Goddowns under their very nose! Do these political chicaneers have any more credibility left amongst the honest citizens in Indian republic, after the series of scams surfaced recently, involving siphoning of billions of rupees from the common man, obviously to line their own pockets and slash it away in Tax Havens?

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com

"LEFT OVER" FOODS-AN ENORMOUS RESOURCE WASTED!

Statistics can some time be breath taking and here is an example. American consumers throw away good foods to the tune of 30 million tons an year which is lot of food even for a rich country like the US. Food wastage is a relative term and how far all the data put on the web are reliable is not known. Since such data are generated based on limited field studies and extrapolated to country level statistics, there could be considerable error in the conclusions drawn from these studies. Still it shows a trend about the insensitivity of citizens in some of the richer countries to the value of food which is taken as granted like water and air. While one can talk about hunger in Asia and Africa endlessly without reaching any where, what strikes as odd is the fact that there are millions of Americans in the US itself who do not have guaranteed access to regular food every day. A paradox of gigantic magnitude indeed!

"Most Americans — even those who are sustainable foodies — definitely lack this habit now. The sustainable food philosophy seems to strangely end with the culmination of each meal: Each American wastes about one pound of food every day, resulting in a country-wide total of about 30 million tons each year, according to the New York Times. Only two percent of this waste is recycled. In fact, about half of our food supply goes uneaten, concluded one 2004 study. A pretty depressing statistic considering that there are currently more than one billion hungry people in the world. Ditching food is actually an incredibly environmentally degrading practice. Change.org blogger David Orr recently wrote that trashed food is a waste of "the resources that went into producing, shipping, and storing that food," including tons of water and oil. He goes on to note that "edible food waste left to rot in the landfill emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change." Finally, he writes,"If we can do a better job of minimizing waste and maximizing yield, we can feed more people with the same amount of land."

"Indeed, it would seem that global hunger is not a food production problem. Rather, it's a distribution issue. In 2008, 49.1 million Americans lived in food insecure households, despite the fact that the country literally throws away millions of tons of perfectly edible chow each year. And the situation seems to have gotten worse lately: The non-profit Feeding America surveyed its members and found 74 percent of pantries, 65 percent of kitchens, and 54 percent of shelters reported an increase in visitors since 2006. Many cities and towns have reported supply shortages at food banks, thanks to continued unemployment and tighter household budgets. Huizar knows that the new model works because it's already been tested. Thousands of L.A. residents receive surplus food leftover from more than 400 events at the L.A. Convention Center each year. Not only does it work, it's a piece of cake to implement: The only thing city, state, and federal policymakers have to do is round up interested non-profits and organizations to package and deliver leftover food that would otherwise be discarded from convention center dinners, board meetings, restaurants, and other city facilities. It's a simple strategy where everyone wins — including the planet".

Food Banks which are working based on donated foods, are doing an excellent job in salvaging at least a small portion of this waste for delivering to the needy but they are able to touch only the fringe of the problem because of many inherent limitations. The logistics involved in saving the food are indeed nightmarish and this is especially true when it comes to salvaging foods wasted at household level. A practical way to tackle this waste is to bring some discipline in eating at the citizen level which in turn, will reflect in reduced buying from the market. Such efforts are bound to have a multiplier effect at national and global levels, with lesser strain on the resources of the earth.

V.H.POTTY

http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com

"FOOD BANK" LAUNC IN INDIA-WILL IT BE VIABLE?

Associating religion with food is historical and Christian Missionaries in many countries are in the forefront in this area of human protection. Though critics may be cut up with the religious label flaunted by such relief organizations, many a time assistance from these organizations can make a difference between perennial hunger and decent life. Food bank concept increasingly being promoted by relief organizations floated by charitable Christian missionaries is increasingly asserting its effectiveness through such banks organizing supplies from donors and delivering to identified recipients. Forcible religious conversion to Christianity by such organizations exploiting the poverty of people is a serious accusation raised against them by critics though there is no evidence regarding such incidences on a massive scale in countries like India where a democratically responsible government exists. USAID with its food assistance program had used christian charities to channel its contributions to the beneficiaries with GOI permission and good storage and distribution net work has been established in the country. The idea to utilize this infrastructure for creating a food bank that will depend mostly on donations is indeed welcome.

"One of the most exciting new partnerships with the potential to accelerate action towards operation is working with Catholic Relief Services (CRS) www.crs.org. CRS has been running a USAID food distribution program in India for more than 50 years. They have built an infrastructure of 60 warehouses that supply a second tier of smaller warehouses and more than 2,000 feeding programs. This USAID program is coming to an end this year, leaving CRS with the dilemma of what to do with their existing infrastructure and the valuable services it delivers to so many people in the nine Indian states where it operates. The emerging food bank system in India provides a timely answer to that question."

How far CRS will be able to garner support for the proposed food bank depends on its success in convincing that the program is not an extension of the promotion of its religion and support from rich donors from all religions and also from different parts of world only can sustain the activity benefiting the poor and the downtrodden. A transparent program open to audit by any one having reservation about the organization and associating a wide spectrum of respectable citizens irrespective of their religious affiliation can be an effective alternative to the cash guzzling government funded applied nutrition programs, rampant with corruption and mismanagement at every level.

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com

A BANK FOR FOOD-HUNGER CHALLENGED!

Wastage of food in advanced countries at the house hold as well as the market levels is known to be phenomenal. One estimate puts the waste equivalent to that which can feed the entire hungry people in this planet. How far these claims are true cannot be judged in absence of accurate data. The wastage in the house holds is a matter of serious concern because cutting down on such wastes is possible only on a voluntary basis. But enormous waste that takes place at the whole sale and retail levels can be saved if proper organizational infrastructure is established to collect, preserve and distribute to those who are hungry due to economic reasons. Food banks in some states of Australia are setting an example as to how wastes can be put to better use by collecting and distributing them to the poor people.

According to a recent report "Foodbank in Australia is a not-for-profit, non-denominational organization that seeks and distributes food and grocery industry donations to welfare agencies which feed the hungry"

Food bank concept originated in the US and the first one started in Phoenix, Arizona in 1967. America's Second Harvest, by far, is the most visible food bank net work with over 200 units across the country. Food banks also operate to a smaller extent in Canada and Europe. They are most effective during natural calamities and other situations where large number of people are to be fed with hot and nurturing foods. Considered as food pantries for people under welfare programs, food banks have set an admirable example of making waste and surplus foods reach those who need them.

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V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://vhpotty.foodtechupdates.blogspot.com