Buying Food Past Its Sell-By Date Tough To Swallow For Greeks

Bargain-hunting Greek shoppers may soon have more options at the grocery store. The government is asking retailers to discount expired nonperishable products in response to rising food prices.

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Bargain-hunting Greek shoppers may soon have more options at the grocery store. The government is asking retailers to discount expired nonperishable products in response to rising food prices.

Austerity measures continue in Greece as the country sinks deeper into a recession. Incomes have dropped nearly 50 percent in some cases, but food prices are at record highs. The Greek newspaper Ekathimerini recently reported that the country has some of the most expensive food and the costliest dairy products in the entire European Union.

In response, the Greek government is now asking retailers to discount nonperishable food that's past it's sell-by dates. As Joanna Kakissis reported for Morning Edition, the country's food safety board will set a final sell-by date that could be a week to three months after the one determined by the manufacturer. (Click below to hear her report.)

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Although grocery auctions and salvage grocery stores are a popular outlet for expired food in the U.S., the news was met with anger from some anti-austerity activists in Greece. They say it forces food that supermarkets "send to the pigs" on those who are already suffering. Many food banks in the U.S. do not accept expired food for similar reasons.

Thanassis Skordas, a deputy development minister in Greece, says the new rules will not apply dairy, meat and other perishable products.The government says the new rules only apply to shelf-stable foods like pasta, spices and canned tomato sauces.

Food experts note that the dates on these foods are used to indicate quality, not safety. The taste and color of nonperishable products may degrade after their sell-by date, but they're not necessarily dangerous.

It's legal to sell food past its sell-by date in much of the U.S. and E.U., and it's been legal in Greece since 1989. Earlier this year, the European Parliament passed a resolution on food waste that called on retailers to sell at a discount food that is nearly-expired to help feed more people. It didn't have any recommendations for food that's past its best-by date.

Skordas says consumers can be assured that the expired food in Greek stores will be easy to spot.

"The items must be also placed on a separate shelf and marked at a much lower price. Of course, we are not forcing anyone to sell these products. But if they choose to, they must follow these rules," he says."

He says it could help consumers save up to 80 percent on food. But setting those discounts is still up to retailers, who are also feeling the recession's pinch.

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Can Riots Be Predicted? Experts Watch Food Prices

A Tunisian protester holds a baguette while taking to riot police in January 2011.

When French peasants stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, they weren't just revolting against the monarchy's policies. They were also hungry.

From the French Revolution to the Arab Spring, high food prices have been cited as a factor behind mass protest movements. But can food prices actually help predict when social unrest is likely to break out?

Yes, say a group of researchers who use mathematical modeling to describe how food prices behave. Earlier this summer, their model had predicted that the U.S. drought would push corn and wheat prices high enough to spark social unrest in other parts of the world.

"Now, of course, we do see this happening," says Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Mass. And unless those food prices come down, the researchers warned last week, more waves of riots are coming.

Obviously, there are complex social reasons why people riot. The current protests in the Mideast were set off by outrage over a crude anti-Islam film. Years of government oppression and economic instability led to the Arab Spring uprising. But it's high food prices, Bar-Yam and his colleagues argue, that create "the range of conditions in which the tiniest spark can lead to riots."

Over the past year, the institute has gotten a lot of attention for its accurate predictions of food price behaviors. Last fall, the researchers released a study that showed big spikes in food prices coincided with food riots in 2007-2008 and 2011, including the events of the Arab Spring.

But their model also offers the potential to forecast future social unrest by identifying "a very well-defined threshold [for food prices] above which food riots break out," Bar-Yam tells The Salt.

In fact, Bar-Yam and his colleagues say they submitted their analysis warning of the risks of social unrest to the U.S. government on Dec. 13, 2010. Four days later, Tunisian fruit and vegetable vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire an event widely seen as the catalyst for the Arab Spring.

The researchers define the riot danger zone in relation to the U.N.'s FAO Food Price Index, which tracks the monthly change in international prices for a basket of cereals, dairy, meat, sugars and oil/fats. Riots become more likely, their model showed, when the index goes above 210. The index has been hovering above that "disruption threshold" since July, pushed upward by the drought in the U.S., the world's biggest exporter of corn and wheat.

"What happened was that food prices went up exactly as predicted," Bar-Yam says.

Wheat is now at $9 per bushel higher than the high of $8.94 hit in February 2011, when the Arab Spring was in full swing. Corn is at $7.56 a bushel, close to the $7.65 highs of 2007-2008 though it spiked well above $8 a bushel this summer. The Mideast is particularly sensitive to wheat prices; it imports most of its wheat, which is a major staple for the region.

While the drought is causing the current spike in food prices, prices have also been on a steady, long-term trajectory upward. So what's behind that trend? NECSI's model has fingered two key suspects: speculation and the conversion of corn to ethanol. (More on that later.) Even without the drought, Bar-Yam says, food prices were headed toward the riot zone by early next year.

The institute's work isn't without critics. Blogging at G-Feed, economist Dave Lobell notes that NECSI's papers aren't peer-reviewed they are simply released publicly. "But in the case of NECSI, I think they have come up with a pretty satisfying solution making testable predictions about the next year," Lobell writes.

And NECSI's research has a prominent fan in Peter Timmer, a professor emeritus at Harvard University and one of the world's leading agricultural economists. The institute consulted Timmer on some of its earlier work, and he joined its faculty this summer.

What the researchers have done, Timmer says, is create "a model that's better than anything my economics colleagues have done to explain food prices. The model really works."

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High Food Prices Forecast More Global Riots Ahead, Researchers Say

A Tunisian protester holds a baguette while taking to riot police in January 2011.

When French peasants stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, they weren't just revolting against the monarchy's policies. They were also hungry.

From the French Revolution to the Arab Spring, high food prices have been cited as a factor behind mass protest movements. But can food prices actually help predict when social unrest is likely break out?

Yes, say a group of researchers who use mathematical modeling to describe how food prices behave. Earlier this summer, their model had predicted that the U.S. drought would push corn and wheat prices high enough to spark social unrest in other parts of the world.

"Now, of course, we do see this happening," says Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Science Institute in Cambridge, Mass. And unless those food prices come down, the researchers warned last week, more waves of riots are coming.

Obviously, there are complex social reasons why people riot. The current protests in the Mideast were set off by outrage over a crude anti-Islam film. Years of government oppression and economic instability led to the Arab Spring uprising. But it's high food prices, Bar-Yam and his colleagues argue, that create "the range of conditions in which the tiniest spark can lead to riots."

Over the last year, the institute has gotten a lot of attention for its accurate predictions of food price behaviors. Last fall, the researchers released a study that showed big spikes in food prices coincided with food riots in 2007-2008 and 2011, including the events of the Arab Spring.

But their model also offers the potential to forecast future social unrest by identifying "a very well-defined threshold [for food prices] above which food riots break out," Bar-Yam tells The Salt.

In fact, Bar-Yam and his colleagues say they submitted their analysis warning of the risks of social unrest to the U.S. government on Dec. 13, 2010. Four days later, Tunisian fruit and vegetable vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire an event widely seen as the catalyst for the Arab Spring.

The researchers define the riot danger zone in relation to the U.N.'s FAO Food Price Index, which tracks the monthly change in international prices for a basket of cereals, dairy, meat, sugars and oil/fats. Riots become more likely, their model showed, when the index goes above 210. The index has been hovering above that "disruption threshold" since July, pushed upward by the drought in the U.S. the world's biggest exporter of corn and wheat.

"What happened was that food prices went up exactly as predicted," Bar-Yam says.

Wheat is now at $9 per bushel higher than the high of $8.94 hit in February 2011, when the Arab Spring was in full swing. Corn is at $7.56 a bushel, close to the $7.65 highs of 2007-2008 though it spiked well above $8 a bushel this summer. The Mideast is particularly sensitive to wheat prices it imports most of its wheat, which is a major staple for the region.

While the drought is causing the current spike in food prices, prices have also been on a steady, long-term trajectory upward. So what's behind that trend? NECSI's model has fingered two key suspects: speculation and the conversion of corn to ethanol. (More on that later.) Even without the drought, Bar-Yam says, food prices were headed toward the riot zone by early next year.

The institute's work isn't without critics. Blogging at G-Feed, economist Dave Lobell notes that NECSI's papers aren't peer-reviewed they are simply released publicly. "But in the case of NECSI, I think they have come up with a pretty satisfying solution making testable predictions about the next year," Lobell writes.

And NECSI's research has a prominent fan in Peter Timmer, a professor emeritus at Harvard University and one of the world's leading agricultural economists. The institute consulted Timmer on some of its earlier work, and he joined its faculty this summer.

What the researchers have done, Timmer says, is create "a model that's better than anything my economics colleagues have done to explain food prices. The model really works."

---

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Canada's Food Insecure Find Help, Community Through Facebook

A mural in the isolated city of Iqaluit, in Canada, where food insecurity is tied up with native culture, poverty, and high food prices.

A mural in the isolated city of Iqaluit, in Canada, where food insecurity is tied up with native culture, poverty, and high food prices.

We've been giving a lot of virtual ink to the problem of food insecurity lately the challenges people face when they frequently can't put enough food on the table. And sometimes it seems like an insurmountable problem.

Take the city of Iqaluit, in Canada's largest territory, Nunavut, just a few hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle. There's no highway, so in the grocery store, a few slices of watermelon can cost $12, heads of cabbage can go for $28, and people sometime stretch cans of meatballs and noodles out for a week. Plus, its become more expensive for the Native people the Nunavummiut to hunt the traditional foods that have sustained them for 4,000 years.

But recently, a Nunavummiut woman and mother of five decided to bring attention the challenges she and families like her face everyday by creating a Facebook group called "Feeding My Family." And now she's got more than 20,000 members.

"I'm worried about the kids that go to bed hungry. I worry about the elders going hungry. I'm going to keep going until the people start to stand up," Leesee Papatsie, the founder of the group, tells Alexandra Townsend, who wrote about Papatsie's story for Facebook's page called "Stories, People Using Facebook in Extraordinary Ways." (Check out the full story and arresting slideshow here.)

Papatsie's group helps to organize protests, compare food prices across the territory, share native hunting and carving tips, and hook up food banks and generous souls with families in need. Sometimes, members just post photos of high-priced fresh food to illustrate the problem, like this pack of peppers priced at $21.89/kg.

But Madeline Redfern, the mayor of Iqaluit, says it's not fair to blame the grocery stores alone for high prices. "Food insecurity in the north is complicated. It's not only access to country food [hunted or gathered food] or the high cost associated with that, it's the graduation rate 75 percent of our kids don't graduate - we have a lot of people who are living in poverty," she says.

And then there's the simple fact that it takes money to get by. As Will Hyndman, founder of a local hunter's market, tells Townsend, "You can't feed your snowmobile a seal. You can't feed it fish. It needs gas and that means cash."

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Extreme Weather Means Extreme Food Prices Worldwide, Aid Agency Warns

Somali girls line up to receive a hot meal in Mogadishu last year after the worst drought in the Horn of Africa in decades, compounded by war, put millions in danger of starvation.

Somali girls line up to receive a hot meal in Mogadishu last year after the worst drought in the Horn of Africa in decades, compounded by war, put millions in danger of starvation.

Reducing greenhouse gases and saving the polar bears tend to dominate discussions on climate change. But to the booming world population, one climate change issue may be even more pressing hunger.

A new report by a leading international relief agency warns that climate change will increase the risk of large spikes in global food prices in the future, and lead to more hungry people in the world. That's because extreme weather like droughts, floods and heat waves are predicted to become much more frequent as the planet heats up.

"Our planet is boiling and if we don't act now, hunger will increase for millions of people on our planet," says Heather Coleman, climate change policy adviser for Oxfam America, which released the report today.

The combination of the severe drought in the U.S. this summer and droughts in Eastern Europe led to a sharp increase in world food prices in July, according to the World Bank. And the world's poorest are particularly vulnerable to spiking food prices, because they use most of their income on food.

As we reported last month, some of the sting may be yet to come. The drought in the U.S. is particularly hard on animal feed, and increases in meat prices may be on the way as a result, although they are not predicted to be as high here as you might expect.

Still, any price increases can make it difficult for poor families to get enough food, even in rich countries. For example, before the recession in 2008, one in 10 U.S. households couldn't find enough food. (The government calls them "food insecure.") For 2010 and 2011, as Pam Fessler reports, that number has increased to one in seven households.

But poor countries in Africa and the Middle East stand to suffer most. That's due in part to the fact that different countries handle price spikes differently.

For example, price swings between 2007 and 2008 resulted in an 8 percent increase in the number of malnourished people in African nations, according to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization.

Meanwhile, large, stable countries like China were able to stabilize grain prices for their people, but smaller countries were vulnerable to high global prices.

In 2010, when an extreme drought in Russia shriveled its crops, food prices there increased, so Russia banned wheat exports, which sent global grain prices soaring.

As climate change makes extreme weather events even more common, the Oxfam report warns that spikes in global food prices may "become the new normal."

As we reported earlier this year, the relationship between climate and hunger is a complex one.

But there are ways people are trying to protect the most vulnerable from the effects of climate change, says Siwa Msangi, a fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute.

Investments in water storage and irrigation systems can help countries get through droughts. Paving roads and improving ports can help prevent floods from disrupting food supplies. Better feeding programs can also help poor people keep their families fed despite price spikes, Msangi says.

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