Posted by Rita Mu
Britain plans to scrap the “best-before” dates on foods in a move to reduce the 5.3 million tonnes of edible food ending up in landfills each year – an amount equivalent to 4,700 Olympic sized swimming pools.
According to the Daily Mail, Britain’s Ministers also plan to withdraw “sell-by” and “display-until” stickers to reduce food wastage, which costs each family around £700 (~ AU $1000) a year. Only “use-by” dates will be kept.
New labels highlighting the health risks of leaving food on the shelf or in the fridge for a long period could be introduced, according to the Daily Mail.
While Australian households waste a staggering $5 billion of food each year, experts have said educating people about food labels is a better strategy to reducing food wastage.
''We can't just keep going back to regulators asking them to change labelling because we are throwing out more food,'' Juliana Madden, the executive officer of the Food Safety Information Council in Australia, told the Sydney Morning Herald.
''What we need to do is take some personal responsibility and be better organised with our shopping, as well as provide better education about the differences between ''use-by'' and ''best-before''.”
According to food security expert Professor Geoffrey Lawrence at the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute, cosmetic perceptions and expectations of foods contribute to unnecessary food wastage.
"Supermarkets do have very strict who can supply them and therefore a lot of food is wasted before it gets on the shelves.” he said. “Consumers seem to be told by the supermarkets and others providing those foods that we should look for perfection.”
Earlier this year, Australian governments, public health groups and the food and beverage industry released the Labelling Logic report, which made several recommendations to the country’s food labelling law and policy.
Recommendations included the introduction of traffic light front-of-pack labelling and codes of practice to enable consumers to readily identify additives, as well as changes to the Nutrition Information Panel to include information on fibre and trans-fat content.
Image: genericlabels.co.uk