A new government report claims Britons are wasting more than £1 billion a year, and the Cabinet Office inquiry into food policy says the average family wastes £420 worth of food each year. All these numbers have prompted Gordon Brown to ask Britons to stop wasting food.
The numbers, however, don’t quite add up. The UK has 60 million people—meaning the average waste per person is less than £20. If the average family size is 21 people, then it is true that each family wastes £420 each year. If not...
Anyway, encouraging Britons to reduce the amount of wasted food is Brown’s latest brilliant idea:
“If we are to get food prices down, we must do more to deal with unnecessary demands, such as by all of us doing more to reduce our food waste," he said.
Yeah, and we can reduce greenhouse gasses enough to save the planet by switching our light bulbs. Enough has already been said about agriculture that anymore simply feels redundant. But what do governments really expect when they subsidize bio-fuel production so heavily, and subsidize food production but then pay the same farmers to leave some plots of land empty to prevent overproduction?
