Criminalize food waste!? Does that mean I’m going to jail if I throw out my uneaten leftovers, or my half-eaten apple?

No.

You’re not going to jail.

Criminalizing food waste would be on a corporate or company level, not on a household level (although there are some rumors floating around that the compost facility might be putting in some taxation in regards to not composting?).

So, what we plan on doing with this by-law is making food waste (in grocery stores) illegal. That being said, it would be an offence, like a traffic violation, or a jaywalking ticket, thus resulting in a fine, and not jail time. (All crimes are offences, not all offences are crimes)

Why do you want to criminalize food waste?

If you take it back to grade 6 science, you’ll remember that people need 4 things to survive: Air, Water, Shelter, and Food. If food is necessary to survive then why do we let people go hungry? Food should be a human right, and if we neglect to provide food we should be in some way shape or form penalized, or punished. Our world has the resources to feed everyone, but we don’t.

With this project, realistically we don’t have the platform to  influence the whole world from our classroom in a span of 4 months. But if we can make a local change, we may be able to spark national change and then like dominoes, one country after another. This is wishful thinking, but if we can make even a small dent in the global challenge of feeding 9 billion people, then that’s what we’ll do.