The Women’s Institute (NFWI) has called on supermarkets to sign up to a voluntary agreement to avoid food waste, as well as to pass surplus food on to charities to help address the issue of food poverty in the UK.
As a first step in the campaign, the NFWI has produced a report and manifesto detailing ways in which supermarkets can adjust their practices to help consumers reduce food waste in the home. From retail practices which encourage overbuying, such as promoting multi-buys and multipacks, to confusing date and product labelling, which can mean consumers are throwing out food prematurely, the report sets out a range of ways supermarkets can help reduce food waste in the home.
As a nation the UK wastes more food than anywhere else in Europe, costing the average household £470 per year. The NFWI points out that farm land roughly the size of Wales is being used to produce all the food that then goes on to be wasted in our homes, generating the equivalent carbon emissions to one in four cars on our roads. And globally, it maintains that if the UK managed to redistribute just a quarter of the food currently wasted, there would be enough food to feed the 870 million people living in hunger.
Read the manifesto here.
