British Government To Begin Crackdown On Food Waste
It’s the equivalent of the government telling you to clean your plate because there are starving people in Africa.
The Government is to launch a campaign to stamp out Britain’s waste food mountains as part of a global effort to curb spiralling food prices.
Supermarkets will be urged to drop “three for two” deals on food that encourage shoppers into bulk-buying more than they need, often leading to the surpluses being thrown away. The scandal of the vast mountains of food that are thrown away in Britain while other parts of the world starve is revealed in a Cabinet Office report today. It calls for a reduction in food waste: up to 40 per cent of groceries can be lost before they are consumed due to poor processing, storage and transport.
The report says UK households could save an average of £420 per year by not throwing away 4.1 million tonnes of food that could have been eaten.
Gordon Brown said he would make action to tackle the soaring cost of food a priority at the G8 summit starting today in Japan. “If we are to get food prices down, we must do more to deal with unnecessary demand, such as by all of us doing more to cut our food waste which is costing the average household in Britain around £8 per week,” he told journalists on board the plane to the summit.
“Do more to deal with unnecessary demand?” And who, exactly, gets to decide that demand which is unnecessary?
It would seem as though the British government is very close to telling Britons exactly how much they will be allowed to eat. Which, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with the ideals of freedom and liberty.
And for what goal? To leave more food available for the hungry in other countries? That’s not going to work. If the British government does manage to succeed in reducing demand for food among Britons to a level that only meets what Britons need to stay alive, and that’s a very big if, this is not necessarily going to create demand among the impoverished, hungry international masses. All it’s going to do is put some of the people who were supplying the excess of food to Great Britain out of business.
The impoverished, hungry international masses won’t be buying more food because the reason they weren’t buying food in the first place had nothing to do with food shortages and everything to do with their political and economic situations. If these people did not live amidst tyranny, if they did not live in totalitarian economic environments, they would have the same sort of access to sustenance that Britons, Americans, the French, the Germans and all the rest of the free and affluent world enjoy.
The idea that the food Prime Minister Brown is apparently going to deny Britons the access to will somehow be boxed up and shipped to those who are hungry in other parts of the world is, on its face, absurd and offensive to those who value things like liberty and freedom. And even if it were possible to get that “excess” food to the people who need it the amount of good it would do would be marginal, because in order to truly cure the plight the hungry masses of the world find themselves in is to empower them to be able to feed themselves.
That means supporting the aspirations of free people around the world. That means helping them fight tyranny and find freedom. That means, as much as leftists will hate to hear it, the Bush doctrine.
Which, I admit, is an imperfect strategy but certainly one that holds up better under scrutiny, and is more in keeping with the ideals of a free society, than the idea that denying citizens of a free society access to government-defined excesses of food will somehow cause that food to appear before the hungry, oppressed masses in other parts of the world.
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