Food for the waste bin

Overproduction in the food industry results in more and more food having to be thrown away. Thomas Le on Unsplash Everyone in Germany wastes around 75 kilos of food every year, according to the German Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL). For a city like Münster, with its 310,000 residents, this means that year after year more than 26,000 tonnes of food land in the waste bin. But are consumers alone responsible for all this food going to waste? Dr. Tobias Gumbert, who examined the question in his PhD thesis at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Münster, would like to see "an holistic approach when looking at the food system". He calls for laws and financial incentives to guarantee that surplus food first goes to people before it ends up becoming fuel in biogas plants or animal feed. This, he says, would establish firm principles for precautionary measures to combat waste. "In Germany, the government usually calls for a voluntary approach, appealing to actors' individual sense of responsibility - for example to private households or individual retailers.