It is a guilt trip inflicted on most children who leave sprouts or cabbage on their plates. ”Eat up,” their mothers chide. ”Think of those starving children in Africa who don’t have such luxuries.” A few grimacing mouthfuls later, the plate is empty.
Adults will be reminded of their youth when they step into a Nigerian restaurant in east London and are faced with a £2,50 (about R28) fine if they fail to finish their dinner. At the Obalende Suya Express restaurant in Dalston, the penalty for greed is donated straight to the local Oxfam shop.
The West African barbecue eatery attracts a full house every Sunday with its Grill Greedy buffet trays and dishes overflowing with steaming meats and fried plantain. As customers fill their plates, however, they can hardly miss a big red sign warning them to make sure they eat it all up.
Lara Odebunmi, who owns the restaurant with her husband Toks, says: ”We realised a lot of people were wasting their food rather than finishing it, just because they could ‘eat as much as they liked’. They kept on taking but they were only ever able to finish one plateful. At the end of the night, we felt really bad dumping all this food into the bin.”
Recent research by management consultancy C-Tech Innovation suggests that Britain wastes more food than any other nation, with each person chucking away more than 30% of the produce they buy each year. FareShare, a national organisation that redistributes surplus food from restaurants and shops to local charities, believes that the food sector accounts for more than a third of all the waste produced in Britain. More than 12 000 people each day eat food that FareShare has rescued from restaurant kitchens and shops’ chillers. But the majority of Britain’s tens of thousands of restaurants simply bin the food they are unable to sell.
The Suya Express isn’t the only restaurant with charitable inclinations. Any suitable surplus food from the kitchens of the gastro-pubs and restaurants of the Whitbread chain, such as TGI Fridays, Pizza Hut and Beefeaters pubs, is picked up by FareShare and redistributed to voluntary groups across the country. Sandwich chain Pret A Manger also offers its remaining produce to charity, supplying FareShare with about 18 tonnes of ”quality surplus food” last year.
”Our food is handmade within the shops but we can only sell it the day it is made,” says Simon Hargraves, commercial director for Pret. ”But the food is perfectly fine to eat as long as it is consumed by 2pm the next day. We always end up throwing good food away; we would like more charities to come to us and pick up our excess food.”
Every Sunday at the Obalende Suya Express Lara Odebunmi is happy to see people queuing for the Grill Greedy buffet. The red sign doesn’t seem to have put anyone off. ”At first, those who hadn’t seen the notice were a bit negative, but when they realised the money was going to charity, they were much more understanding,” she says. ”The response has been overwhelming. Customers don’t waste food any more — they appreciate it.”
There is only one snag to the scheme: while the plates are being left empty, so is the Oxfam fine pot. — Â