Celebrity Chef’s War on Waste Returns to Screens and Shows Upturn in Charitable Food Redistribution

25 Jul 2016 --- Celebrity chef and food campaigner Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is returning to BBC1 with the latest news about charity redistribution of surplus food that shows encouraging results.

In the six months between filming episode two and episode three of Hugh’s War on Waste TV series, the volumes of food that FareShare received from retailers and food manufacturers has skyrocketed by 60 percent.

During last year’s episode Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall visited the FareShare Merseyside team filming how the charity redistributes good food that would otherwise be scrapped. The organization sent food to almost 2,500 frontline charities and community groups across the UK so they can provide nutritious meals to vulnerable people in need.

Talking on the program, Hugh said: “Seeing a bunch of kids getting a fantastic meal from food that would otherwise be thrown away – well, it makes you realize that all the retailers and all their suppliers really have to commit to an incredibly important principle – that food that can be eaten by human beings should be eaten by human beings.”

In the third and final episode of the series, to be screen on BBC on Thursday July 28, Hugh visits Southampton, another of the charity’s 20 regional centers, where FareShare CEO Lindsay Boswell explains that the volume of food FareShare received was 60 percent higher in December 2015 that it had been six months earlier.

That equates to an extra 50,000 people being fed every week with food that otherwise would have been thrown away.

“Last year, we redistributed more food than ever before, enough for frontline charities including homeless shelters, children’s breakfast clubs and domestic violence refuges to provide 18.3 million meals for vulnerable people,” says Boswell.

“Yet we’re only accessing a tiny percentage of the surplus that the food and drink industry produces. Hundreds of thousands of tons of perfectly edible food still gets thrown away, or used to generate energy or animal feed, every year – we estimate there’s enough to provide at least 650 million meals for people in need.”

“Every one of our regional centers has a waiting list of charities that need food, and that’s why we’re urgently calling for more food companies to work with us to redistribute their good, surplus produce, and for more volunteers to help us get that food to the people who need it most.”

The program will also feature new initiatives that are helping supermarkets to redistribute food that remains unsold in their stores at the end of the day. These include FareShare FoodCloud, which combines technology and on-the-ground support to connect stores with local charities.

Tesco is the first retailer to invest in and rollout FareShare FoodCloud to its stores and after just four months, the scheme has already provided enough food for more than half a million meals to over 1,400 charities and community groups.

by Gaynor Selby