Supermarkets, labeling and waste

Freegans eat out of bins. They're different from tramps in that they don't actually have to, as they're often posh trustafarians like most squatters (or people who study art history at university.) That said these toff wombles (or 'urban foragers') are onto something. Dumpster living or bin raiding is a form of 'ethical eating' and is a reaction against the wastefulness of the supermarkets, the industrialisation of food production and the exploitation of animals.

None of these issues were crossing my mind when I lunched on all the uneaten Marks & Spencer's ready meals I recently excavated from the bin in the office kitchen, all items were just moments out of their-sell-by-date.

This week it was announced that new legislation is to make it mandatory for food to be labeled with either a 'best before' or 'use by date' that will encourage consumers not to view their perfectly good food as a potential bio hazard until it is actually unsafe, which is what the sell-by-date has been found to encourage thanks to a survey for Morrisons finding that 55% of shoppers bin food unnecessarily.

Just when you thought the coalition hadn't introduced a single good policy they whip this one out of the bag. The agreement was brokered by the Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs following consultation with manufacturers and supermarkets and it's one of their most hopeless ministers who's talking it up, the environment secretary Caroline 'forest sell-off' Spelman.

It's reckoned that £12bn of food is needlessly chucked every year, around 5.3m tonnes of still-edible food, costing the average family £680 a year. The waste reduction body Wrap break down some of the tonnage wasted every day into 5 million potatoes, one million loaves of bread, 440,000 ready meals, 5,500 chickens and one million slices of ham. Apart from being completely immoral in a world where a billion people are starving, there is a cost to the economy and environment in transporting wasted food and dumping it in landfill.

Despite being a sensible sounding policy that no-one could really disagree with the supermarkets haven't taken to the idea, with their trade body The British Retail Consortium, expressing doubts.

Spokesman Andrew Opie said: "If the Government really wants to make a difference to reducing food waste it should be educating consumers about the two basic terms — use by and best before. This system is carefully used by retailers and it isn't complicated."

So the supermarkets don't want to take any responsibility and would prefer tax payers fund an ad campaign to explain the terminology. Food campaigners point out that the three- for-two deals supermarkets offer are partially to blame for the massive amount of food waste, an issue Opie didn't address.

The freegans are right to highlight the politics of food and particularly the total supremacy of the supermarkets in the UK, who like the banks, are too big, too powerful and almost completely dominant.

That this little nudge of a policy got past them is surprising. Similar attempts to introduce a traffic light labeling system for food (that would indicate high fat and salt content with a red label) ended up as a voluntary scheme due to intense lobbying from the food manufacturers, defeating an attempt in the European Parliament to make them mandatory. Some supermarkets like Sainsbury's and Waitrose signed up to the voluntary code whereas some, like Tesco didn't, and along with Pepsico and Kraft are coming up with their own scheme, which will be guaranteed not to harm sales of junk food.

The coalition needs to tackle the labeling issue as Britain currently tops the Euro fat league with 24.5 per cent of the adult population being classified as obese.