Friday, May 23, 2008

Britons Throw Away Third of all Food

British consumers throw out a third of all food bought, worth some 10 billion pounds (12.7 million euros, 19.5 million dollars), a study showed Thursday.

The average household throws food worth 420 pounds each year into the waste bin, rising to 610 pounds for those with children, said the study by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap).
More information on the report here.

I am surprised that the number is so high. Seems like a lot of room for improvement.

I wonder how the waste in a restaurant compares with that in a house. If people started eating out more, would this increase or decrease this amount of waste?

via Breitbart

3 comments:

Rebelfish said...

"If people started eating out more, would this increase or decrease this amount of waste?"

I can't imagine it would go down. Imagine all the meals (not to quote John Lennon) that are not taken home as take-on, and all those that then go bad in the fridge. I bet a large chunk of that thrown-out food arises from restaurants.

Anonymous said...

I was brought up to not waste any food so it sickens me to see this, but in my own house (with two young daughters), we throw away a lot of food. For example, they eat a lot of bread, and we cut off the crust of every piece, plus throw out the heels. Add in the occasional loaf that goes moldy, and we probably throw away 20% of our bread. But I would have to agree with rebelfish, the majority of food we throw away is restaurant food.

I've recently started bringing in to work unopened food that would otherwise get thrown out for one reason or another. I put it in a bag in the lunchroom and it's gone in about 15 minutes.

Jeremy

Fat Knowledge said...

Hmm, you guys must cook better than me, because any leftovers I get from the restaurant I always finish up the next day. :)

For me, I tend to find that I buy food at the grocery store that I think I will cook up, but then get lazy and end up throwing it out because it goes bad before I get around to eating it. I was thinking that a restaurant would do a better job of managing the food that it buys and actually cooking it all up than individuals would do. I also was thinking that food at grocery stores that goes bad before people buy it should be allocated to individuals as well. Don't know if that is very large or not. But, I had forgotten about the fact that many people don't eat all the food they are served at a restaurant because the portions are too large, or there are certain parts of the meal that people don't want to eat.

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