World Food Day 2017
On the 2nd of October 2017 twenty-two teenagers and young adults took up their voluntary service at the youngCaritas in South Tyrol (Italy). We are a quite ragtag group – linguistic as well as cultural. Consequently our duties and responsibilities are very different from each other too: While many of us work with refugees, others are in charge of organizing and executing different projects. Just such a project was conducted on the 16th of October 2017 – the World Food Day. On this occasion some young volunteers assembled in the head quarters of the youngCaritas for a workshop to take a symbolic stand against food waste. Mainly everything revolved about one question:
How can one avoid waste?
In the morning – by means of a workshop – the group got really into the topic of food waste. With the help of many, partly shocking, facts and figures the teenagers got sensitized to this topic.
Afterwards the teenagers worked on suggestions how to improve the dramatic situation. Cooking meals with leftovers or writing shopping lists were only a few encouragements to a sensible consumption of food.
At lunchtime the good intentions were immediately implemented: an Italian supermarket at Bolzano donated food to the teenagers, which it couldn´t sell anymore, but was still enjoyable.
Such actions wouldn´t be possible, if there hadn´t been the new Italian law against food waste in spring 2016. According to that, supermarkets are now allowed to donate products, which otherwise would be dumped, to relief organizations. In France, where the law took effect afore, the supermarkets even have to expect penalties for casting away edible food.
With the collected leftovers the volunteers cooked a felicitous meal which – surprise surprise – did definitely not taste of scrap.
