Food: Waste
Lord Laming Excerpts(12 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Taylor of Holbeach
The Energy from Waste programme is subsidised and incentivised. It is up to local authorities to decide the best channel for their food waste. I mentioned before that Defra sees huge advantages in the use of anaerobic digestion as an efficient method of converting food waste into energy.
Lord Laming
My Lords, has Defra taken an interest in the impact of unnecessarily short use-by dates on a lot of food?
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
A great deal of work has been done on food marking. Some of those labels merely tell the shops when the product should be taken off the shelves, and it is really more for stock control. Some great strides have been made. The reduction in food waste will depend very much on consumers being aware that the use-by date still means that you can freeze the product and that it is still healthy to eat. By informing the consumers about the practical information that is available to them, we can save people throwing away food that is perfectly healthy.