Unilever’s astonishing Food Poverty: What a Waste - Clear a Plate advertisement ((26 November) should come as no surprise. The food waste-food poverty link has been the mantra of the transnational Global Foodbanking Network (to which Unilever contributes) for a number of years. Not only is this supposed link ethically questionable (wasted food for surplus peoples, really?), there is no evidence in practical terms that the one addresses, let alone solves, the other. Food banks are always running out of food and no amount of surplus, wasted, rescued, or donated food will ever be sufficient to meet the varied food and nutritional needs of the income-poor.
The Clear a Plate ad underlines the growing, if not already entrenched, corporatisation of food charity and the long reach of the global food giants to advance their neoliberal brand of corporate social responsibility. As such, Clear a Plate feeds the public perception that food poverty is not a political matter requiring the priority attention of the state, but one that can be solved by well-meaning individuals and food banks collecting and redistributing “left-over” food to the hungry poor. Not on the menu is a right to food, informing joined-up food policy with an adequate social wage.
Food waste is a problem, but does the food production and retail industry really expect to solve this through creating a secondary food market for the poor, now increasingly dependent on the happenstance of charitable food banking and volunteer labour?
Food banks have now arrived in the UK – a neoliberal dream come true. However, what is more outrageous is that Oxfam has bought into this.
Emeritus professor Graham Riches
Former director, School of Social Work, University of British Columbia
• An important aspect of campylobacter contamination in the intensive chicken industry was omitted in your At a glance section (25 November). Scientists at Liverpool Veterinary School have recently discovered that, contrary to previous assumptions, the bug affects the health of the birds too, causing inflammation of the gut, leading to diarrhoea and painful ulceration of feet and hock joints. The researchers also found that this mostly occurs in those selected for fast growth – in other words in most of the 900m or more chickens slaughtered annually in the UK. Surely this massive (human-made) animal welfare problem is worth a mention?
Clare Druce
Holmfirth, West Yorkshire
