Archive | 2019
Food Sharing in Practice: The German Experience in Magdeburg
Abstract
The sharing food trend is achieving again popularity at present in industrialised countries. The main reason seems correlated with food overproduction. ‘Food sharing’ communities have a basic aim: to avoid the waste of food by gifting food commodities to needful people or institutions. Indeed should some food be wasted along the food supply chain, this waste would also concern energy and efforts that have been invested in food-related activities. In industrialised countries such as Germany, the principal food waste source is identified with household consumers and retailers (up to 40% of all wasted foods), while the resting amount is reported to be caused during processes as production, agriculture, post-harvesting, and processing activities. In Germany, as indicated by a statistic from 2012, 11 million tonnes of food coming from food industries, trade, wholesale, and private households (60%) are wasted annually. The answer of German citizens is the sharing economy, and this project essentially relies upon the presence of physical distribution points and/or network platforms, empowered by information and communication technologies, with different applications. Nowadays, more than 200,000 ‘foodsavers’ are engaged in this no-profit and non-commercial project in the Germany/Austria/Switzerland area. This Chapter described some of the local implementation efforts in Germany and a Magdeburg-based experience in particular.