
French supermarkets banned from throwing away and spoiling unsold food - csdfg7856
http://www.thinkerspost.com/2016/11/french-supermarkets-banned-from.html
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grondilu
This is frankly worrying, as I suspect authorties are underestimating the
complexity of an issue, or just chose to ignore it, mostly for populist
motives.

It seems to me that food nowadays is ridiculously cheap, and I'm pretty sure
everyone would agree this is a good thing. Now, I'm no expert but the only way
I can explain it, is that we produce a lot of food, so much that we can't sell
it all.

People who work in food distribution are pretty smart, and they must have good
reasons to destroy food before throwing it away (bleach is not free after
all).

As often, I fear this measure is an other attempt from a government to fiddle
with an industry it does not understand.

And again, this strikes me as populist. Because frankly, in France poor people
don't starve.

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fanzhang
Agreed. Not throwing away food presumably means needing to preserve it and
donate it to a food kitchen (or similar) right?

If that's the case, what are the resources required to: preserve the food
before donation; deliver the food to the donation point; cleaning up food that
spoiled before it can be donated?

Maybe they did a study on that and showed that the costs were really low -- a
small fraction of the profit margin. In that case it might not be as bad, but
I doubt such a study was done.

