This week’s Changemakers Top 100 special edition features the world’s leading thinkers, shakers and agitators. Throughout the week we’ll be highlighting just a few online.
Nobody should be going hungry in one of the world’s richest countries – we can all agree on that. But poverty and hunger have been spiralling in the UK.
Lindsay Boswell, CEO of FareShare food waste charity, is a driving force in the fight to ensure everyone has access to healthy food: almost three quarters of a million people eat each week thanks to their work with 10,000 charities around the UK.
Reducing waste, redistributing anything that isn’t sold or eaten and directing it where it’s needed is what he has been doing with FareShare for the last decade. A growing field of work for FareShare which is set to increase this year is working with kids’ clubs to tackle holiday hunger.
And there was welcome news at the end of 2017 for their work when Environment Secretary Michael Gove announced £15m to create 250 million meals worth of food. This means that organisations that hold food, which are not able under current legislation to redistribute it, will from this year be able to make it available to FairShare and the charities they work with.
“We see this fund as principally for food producers and not the supermarkets,” Boswell explains. “Right now it actually costs farmers, manufacturers and packers a lot less to dump or recycle fresh, in-date food than to redistribute it to good causes – in part because of the cost of keeping the surplus food fit for human consumption. With the barriers to charitable food redistribution removed, businesses will no longer be penalised for doing the right thing with their food: using it to feed people.”
