British Civics Class Asks, What Would Muhammad Do

Warm-up questions:

Do you ever buy ready-made meals from the supermarket? What do you think are some good ready-made meals? When do you usually have them?

Do you ever throw out food? What kind of food do you throw out? How do you decide whether to throw food out or not? How do you feel about throwing out food?

Are you careful about reading the label before you buy something? What kind of information on the labels is most important to you?

1. What is a "freegan"? (Make sure your answer would be clear to someone who has not read the article.)

2. Explain how the journalist was able to prepare lunch for eight people and spend only 40 pence?

3. Why does the journalist compliment Marks & Spencer's?

4. How does the government explain the enormous waste of food in Great Britain?

5. What has the government proposed to reduce the amount of food waste.

6. Which of the date labels are intended for shoppers and which one is the most important? Why is it important?

7. Which of the date labels are intended for the shops and what purpose do they have?

8. Why should the food industry be blamed for the confusion and consequent waste of food?

9. Why is it difficult to set a "use-by" date for ready-made meals? (Give two reasons.)

10. What advice does the journalist give shoppers when it comes to deciding whether or not to throw out food?

"sell by" or “display until” is a guide for the store to know how long it can display a product for sale. The "best before" refers to a quality or flavor of the food. "Use by" works more like an expiration date, similar to that on medicines, and taking them after the date is not recommended.

Supermarket labels lead to food waste

I once spent a very happy hour in the bins at the back of a Marks & Spencer supermarket. A group of freegans – people whose dietary constraint is that they don't pay – took me along on their regular midnight "bin-diving". In the supermarket's well-stocked dumpsters we found unbelievable bounty: roasts and salads, smoked salmon, tiger prawns and extravagant ready meals, asparagus, strawberries, cherries, cakes, cheeses, chickens all in perfect condition. Sell-by dates on most of the food had passed just an hour or so earlier.

We did not find anything that was not perfectly edible. How could we tell? By using those old-fashioned pre-barcode tools, our eyes and noses. When the six of us emptied our rucksacks back in their flat we had nearly £3,000 worth of food. The freegans, all university students, told me that taking up bin-diving had changed their lives. They were richer and they had never eaten so well. I was there in the cause of journalism, of course, but I did manage to cook a three-course lunch for eight people the next day at a total cost of 40p (l had to buy a couple of onions). Well done, Marks & Spencer – great food, imaginatively presented, and they hadn't poured bleach or dye in their bins as most supermarkets do.

On Tuesday Hilary Benn, the Environment Minister, announced a government initiative: an end to sell-by and best-before dates, as a way of blocking food waste. "Too many of us are putting things in the bin simply because we're not sure, we're confused by the label, or we're just playing safe." He's absolutely right: Wrap, the Government's waste and recycling agency, says that we throw out more than 220,000 tonnes (£1 billion) of edible food each year while it is still technically in-date – a sizeable amount of the amazing 30 per cent of all the food we buy that is discarded uneaten.

Wrap's survey tells a depressing story. Fifty three per cent of us would never eat fruit or veg after its

best-before date. Thirty six per cent believe best before is the same as "use by". Half of us don't

understand the different date labels “use by”, “best before”, “sell by” or “display until”.[1]

It's easy to blame ignorant consumers for this senseless waste. However, one view holds the food industry at least in part to blame. "Sell-by and best-before don't do consumers any good at all," Wrap's Julia Falcon told me. "They are to do with stock control more than safety, and should never have been visible."

Supermarkets have to keep the supply of fresh and chilled food rolling through their shelves, because most of such stock is ordered a couple of weeks earlier. "Display until" or "sell by" is no more than a manifestation of the queue of products waiting in their store rooms. So why do shops simply not put "display until" in code, and give customers a simple "use by" date?

Another problem is the chilled ready meals of which Britons are so fond (we eat more of them than the rest of Europe put together). Creating sauces to go with meat or fish and vegetables so that they all grow old in concert is a technical balancing act for manufacturers. "And you can't control what happens outside the shop door," says one supermarket executive. "How do you know that the customer won't leave the product in the boot of a hot car for four hours?" So use-by dates on such products are short - which may explain why, according to Wrap's investigations of our rubbish bins, we throw away around 440,000 ready-made meals every day.

"We have become very reliant on dates on labels, even though we don't really understand what they mean," says Falcon. And we're so frightened of food going bad that we throw it away before we think.' So what's the answer for the busy home cook? Judicious deployment of the nose, taste and eyes, along with use-by dates it's time we learnt to trust our senses again.

Bin-diving, I suppose I should point out, is technically both trespass and theft. But it's terribly satisfying

Supermarket labels lead to food waste