Friday, January 16, 2009

Food Police to Prevent Waste?

Bismarck has a link to a story out of the U.K. on the food police.

Householders are to be visited by officials offering advice on cooking with leftovers, in a Government initiative to reduce the amount of food that gets thrown away.

Home cooks will also be told what size portions to prepare, taught to understand "best before" dates and urged to make more use of their freezers.

The door-to-door campaign, which starts tomorrow, will be funded by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), a Government agency charged with reducing household waste.

The officials will be called "food champions". However, they were dismissed last night as "food police" by critics who called the scheme an example of "excessive government nannying".

It bears repeating that this is the sort of silliness that happens when we assume the government should be in charge of everything. Food police? I just sat through a lecture last night at the P.T.A. meeting from a doctor telling us not to make our kids clean their plates. And while some people like leftovers (I don't), most of us remember mushy reheated veggies and meat that tasted terrible after a warm-up or two.

I'm not saying that preventing food waste is a bad thing. You can run a public service announcement if you want, or try to get on Oprah. But do we want to go down this road, paying people 16 bucks an hours to lecture people on not wasting food?