Feeding as a principle of responsibility
Last 21st October Feeding Zaragoza celebrated its 5th anniversary (the 3rd as an association) by delivering 5.000 meal portions, all made up of foods due to be thrown away. The action, held at Plaza del Pilar in Zaragoza, was an all round success, and it even spurred an improvised outcome when a thousand portions were donated to El Refugio, a social institution, which further helped sustain the association’s motto: do not throwing away a single kilogram of food. #ZgzNoTiraComida
Solidarity is core to Feeding, something inevitable given the altruist impulse of those involved; but it actually has more to do with social responsibility rather than anything else. Feeding ultimately works to limit and finally put an end to the meaningless food waste in which supermakets, restaurants and even particulars incurr on a daily basis.
“It is so difficult and so simple as a change in the laws. That would make the difference and that is the goal we’ve been working for, in the last five years, through the actions we launch. For us humans it should not be acceptable having 800 to 1.000 million people suffering with starvation, while tons of food perfectly eatable are being thrown away every day, just for the sake of a negligible packaging defect or because it is food leftover”.
So speaks Raúl Blas, vicepresident of Feeding Zaragoza, who stresses the solution. “Italy and France have already achieved that change. Now retailers can be sanctioned if they throw away food not spoiled or out of date. And there is a tax benefit for all those who have implemented this practice, which can’t be postponed. Whereas in the USA only the ‘expiry date’ is now legal; the ‘best-before date’ has been outlawed, since it is false and arbitrary, and promotes consumism and the waste of food still up to be used. As almost everything else does, the whole thing depends on two basic ingredients: awareness and wilingness”.
Raúl Blas cooked this challenge in his mind for months… and the outcome was a mixture of joy and hope: “The intention was to celebrate this 5 years in a powerful manner and I think we made it. There have been only ten Feeding 5.000 registered in the whole world and ours made it 11. But put aside the quantity of people participating, what I will really take off it is with the way people responded to the call. And the volunteering. We reached 300 thousand volunteers and had to close down the mail address we set up for them to register; more and more applications kept coming in, it was truely overwhelming. Many of them were young people who fully discredited the idea of a youth unready for compromise”.
“There is something to be done and there is definitely people with whom to do it. We run many awareness activities in schools… We need to be joined by more and more people. If you’re up to it, please mail us at feedingzgz@gmail.com or visit our Feeding Zaragoza site in Facebook. Our future hangs there. Not just ours, but the whole future of a responsible and sustainable society”.
