A Different Type of Food Security

There’s no need to bore you with my frankly hilarious attempts at reintegrating into western, capitalist society. Yesterday I got to grips with London’s Oyster card. Tomorrow I might try scanning my own groceries at Tesco. There are lots of differences from my old life in Africa, and I suspect you’d get tired of my bumbling attempts to catch up with new technologies that had passed me by.

But I can’t let some things go without comment. At the start of the week the government unveiled its new food security strategy. Whereas Kenya might have announced plans to grow more of the stuff, in Britain the main aim is to stop us throwing so much of it away. This from The Times…

Households throw away 4.1 million tonnes of food each year that could have been eaten if it had been managed better, according to Wrap, the Government’s waste watchdog. Food waste costs the average household £420 a year and the average person throws away more than their own weight in food annually. Single-person households, now almost a third of all homes, waste the most, partly because bogofs encourage them to buy quantities they cannot eat by the use-by date.

For those of you not up with the lingo, bogofs are "buy one get one free" offers.