£10bn food wasted in UK each year

More than £10 billion worth of food is wasted in the UK each year while one in five British households lives below the poverty line, leading charity Oxfam has revealed.

The charity warned that supermarkets and restaurants, as well as ordinary people need to tackle food waste, implementing a series of tighter controls on their consumption patterns.

“At the moment we pay supermarkets and other food businesses to trash the planet, to grow food, and then waste a third of it. We need to make a demand as consumers that they change their behavior as well”, RT quoted author of ‘Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal’ Tristram Stuart as saying.

This comes as the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) revealed earlier that nearly five million people across Britain are struggling to afford nutritious meals.

The study says job losses, benefit cuts and rising food prices have led to the food crisis in the country, forcing families to spend 20 percent more on food than five years ago while eating seven percent less.

In October last year, Trussell Trust also predicted that the number of people relying on emergency food rations will increase to over 200,000 in the whole of 2012-13.