What is Foodsaving?

All over the world people demonstrate and demand action to prevent further global warming and climate change. In addition to all these actions, we also can and have to do concrete things in the often forgotten area of food waste. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, 1/3 of food is wasted globally across the supply chain, contributing 8 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions. Hence, if food loss and waste were a country, it would be the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter.

The plot is taken from U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization [http://www.fao.org/3/a-bb144e.pdf].

In Germany foodsharing.de was created as a grassroots volunteer movement with origins in the dumpster diving scene. It has scaled up to co-ordinate the activities of 30k food savers to collect leftovers from supermarkets and share it in public fridges. This was achieved with almost no external funding.

We believe that for solving a problem you cannot use the very practices that produce it in the first place: Hierarchies lead to passive individuals who wait for their leader’s decisions and don’t dare to get active on their own accord. For-profit organizations need to make money and will always prioritize this goal. We are not just here to save food, but want to support and encourage self-help,personal responsibility, non-hierarchical  organization, equality, equity and solidarity. This brings us inline with the wider co-operative and solidarity economics movement. To reject the capitalist structures that cause the problem in the first place.