Feeding 5000 with 'waste' food

The Guardian: " ... The Feeding the 5000 team – a coalition of Fareshare, FoodCycle, Love Food Hate Waste and Friends of the Earth, led by food waste expert Tristram Stuart– treated Grondona and 4,999 others to a free meal using food that would otherwise have been wasted, such as cosmetically imperfect fresh fruit 
and vegetables – in short, wonky carrots.

The misshapen ingredients were not salvaged from nearby skips but supplied directly by farmers who sell their goods to supermarkets. "The supermarkets have strict cosmetic standards, so if a carrot is too long or slightly bent, it either goes in the bin or is left out in the field and simply ploughed back into the ground," Stuart says. "Today, that's not happened and all that food is here to be eaten."

While UK consumers cannot access farmers' surplus produce, Stuart hopes the event will inspire people to stop wasting food and to demand businesses end the practice of dismissing unsightly goods. Some supermarkets tried selling ugly vegetables in 2008 after an EU ruling meant odd-shaped and oversized produce could be sold in the UK.

As well as the 5,000 portions of curry on offer, a live cooking tent was showing the public how to cook and eat discarded bits of animals such as hearts, lungs and offal (offal consumption has apparently halved in the UK during the past 30 years). There were also 1,600 pints of apple juice ready to be drunk and celebrity chefs turning waste into well-seasoned goodies."


http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/nov/18/waste-food-feeds-5000-trafalgar