Supermarkets are often accused of being irresponsible for several reasons, some of which are:
- They help to close down local shops (just look at BDL’s high street)
- They spread pollution through clients’ cars driving there
- They encourage food wastage by bulk buying and special offers.
- They throw away a lot of the overdue date items instead of distributing them to people on low incomes.
- Some of them underpay and overwork their staff.
- They are too often built on green field rather than brown-field sites.
It makes, therefore, a pleasant change when some supermarkets show a bit of social community consciousness. I won’t advertise this particular supermarket except to say that it’s near Ghivizzano.
There’s clearly-marked encouragement to buy food which is near its sell-by date at a discount.
There are collection points for voluntary giving of food to stray, and abandoned pets and animals (with a free token gift if one contributes).
There are also collection points for giving of food to needy families, so rapidly and shamefully increasing in Italy (not to mention what is happening in the UK and what will become worse after March 29th this year).
There are also posters making people aware that abuse towards women (in a country where there’s at least one woman killed by a man every three days) doesn’t have to be visibly seen but can also be psychological and kept out of sight.
I wish more supermarkets had a social conscience like this…
Another way that supermarkets can be more socially aware is with regard to the payments they make to their sources. Recently, because of the low price they obtained for their milk, Sardinian dairy farmers protested by throwing away large quantities of the stuff. ‘It’s just not worth us selling milk at the prices we get for it.’
An extreme protest indeed…at least the farmers could have donated the milk to needy families. Meanwhile, a well-known UK supermarket chain has issued these labels on its milk products. I thank Sandra Pettitt for bringing this to my attention and for sending me these photographs.
I was most shocked to see those heartbreaking images of milk strewn onto streets in Italy Sardinia, Tuscany, Sicily by irate farmers. I thought this was a truly unsound tactic all in order to obtain a fair price for an underpriced product. I was glad to hear that some farmers donated milk to gleeful children who lined up to receive their gift in their milk bottles this reminded me when as children we too were lucky enough to receive free milk for a while. In the U.K. I learnt that some supermarkets help look after a fleet of cows which they support by giving farmers a fair price and this enables farmers to better tend to these animals. Italy maybe could well adopt this kind of farming. It would be interesting for those people in offices who set the milk price to muck out feed collect feed etc for a day I am sure that they would never offer such insulting prices for any products to farmers who sustain populations with such tough work year in years out. Also it was truly a scandal to see such waste when there are needy people in Italy and throughout the planet.
Thanks for your heartfelt comment.