EYE 2021

United Against Food Waste: Making sure food ends up in people’s stomachs

Foodsharing Luxembourg participated at the European Youth Event (EYE) at the European Parliament in Strasbourg with thousands of young people from all over the European Union and beyond with a workshop where participants came up with ideas on how to tackle food loss and food waste.

Thank you! That is what “United Against Food Waste” stands for!

Our workshop took place on Saturday, October 9, 2021, from 14:00 to 15:00

Picture by Eunice Sánchez González

Results from the workshop

We divided up the workshop participants into 5 groups. Each group was dealing with one of the following topics: food loss, food service, retail, household. Only the last topic – household – was treated by two groups as we had to split it up due the huge interest. Here the top 3 political demands of each group are listed.

Food loss

  1. Increase youth education about how to value food, how to prevent food waste and how to reduce wasteful tendencies
  2. Optimise food production with scientifically proven solutions
  3. Open more channels for redistribution, e.g. special stores for overproduction or for unconventional looking vegetables

Food services

  1. Make food waste visible by forcing food services to publish their food waste production and to quantify the GHG emissions of their food offered
  2. Make donating unsold surplus mandatory and fund organisations that work with food leftovers
  3. Include food waste solutions in climate policies

Retail

  1. Simplify the expiration law and ban throwing away food
  2. Remove all legal barriers to sell expired but still edible food and fund stores that do sell them
  3. Force retail businesses to inform their customers about their food waste

Household 1

  1. Make consumers reflect on their consumption
  2. Support consumers by instructing them on how to prepare and conserve food at home
  3. Introduce food waste regulations for stores selling food

Household 2

  1. Educate consumers about food waste
  2. Make consumers aware of secondary uses
  3. Introduce penalties for food being wasted

We will continue to work with these and all the other ideas for political demands in our upcoming political work activities. Stay tuned!

Thanks to all the workshop’s organisers, facilitators and participants!