Evening Standard comment: Dealing with food poverty: here’s how

The scandal that people in London — as many as 400,000 — struggle to feed themselves and their families while enormous amounts of food goes for animal feed or energy generation is the basis of this paper’s Food for London campaign. We have identified the extent to which food is wasted in the retail sector and the figures are quite staggering: only three per cent of unsold fresh food from supermarkets goes to charity; 97 per cent does not. Now we want to do something about it.

Food suppliers do not actually want to waste food; they are, moreover, very willing to allow charities that feed those in need to have their surplus fruit and vegetables — which many people in food poverty often cannot afford. The difficulty is getting fresh food at or near its sell-by date to the charities which help the food-poor. Many charities already collect surplus food from supermarkets to give to, for instance, the homeless, but the distribution network is patchy and unreliable.

One organisation has this single objective — to deliver surplus food from suppliers to the charities that need it. It is The Felix Project, which Justin Byam Shaw, this paper’s chairman, and his wife set up in memory of their late son, Felix. It uses its own vehicles and depot to store and transport fresh food to charities which provide meals and produce to those in food poverty. Our campaign seeks to help the project expand, to take on more employees and to increase the scale of its work.

The Food for London campaign seeks to identify the sheer extent of the problem of wasted food and to encourage suppliers to be open both about the problem and about the amount of produce they give to charities. Laudably, Sainsbury’s yesterday made this information available for the first time to this paper: transparency is the first step in addressing the problem.

But we also want the Department for the Environment to provide robust guidelines of best practice for retailers: we look to the Environment Secretary, Andrea Leadsom, to give a lead. It should be a cross-party endeavour.

People who are on the breadline, struggling to feed their families, often cannot afford fresh fruit and vegetables; giving them access to them will transform their diets. And as Frank Field MP writes in a letter to this paper today, there is far more retailers could do: for instance, in selling fresh produce cheaply in social supermarkets. We are looking for solutions to food poverty and food waste. This campaign will identify the problem and, we hope, address it.