The Malaysian Insider :: Food
The Malaysian Insider :: Food |
| Aussie McDonald’s offers table service and plates for Big Macs Posted: 07 Feb 2013 08:01 PM PST  Select locations in the UK offered 'McWaiters' who provided table service for customers last year. According to Good Food, a franchisee in the suburb of Warilla outside Sydney has been given the green light by the fast food giant to offer plates, cutlery and table service for its dine-in customers. The idea took hold from a simple gesture and a bit of special treatment from franchisees Glenn and Katia Dwarte, who began to serve their parents with proper dishware — an uncommon sight that drew the attention of other customers, reports Good Food. In addition to getting corporate approval from the bigwigs in Chicago, the fast food giant has also designed and produced a flyer to promote the service. For the next five weeks, between 5pm and 8pm EDT Mondays and Tuesdays, customers at the Warilla outlet who order a Grand Angus, Big Mac or Chicken Deluxe meal will have the option of restaurant-style service, their meal served on proper plates and accompanying cutlery — no trays needed. It's not the first time McDonald's has played with the idea of full-service fast food. As part of their efforts to create family-friendly restaurants last year, select locations in the UK offered 'McWaiters' who provided table service for customers. Meanwhile, restaurant-style, fast food service is just one of the innovations being piloted at a fast food chain in a bid to attract customer loyalty. Burger King, for instance, has embarked on an ever expanding delivery service in the US that brings their signature Whopper sandwiches to customers' doorsteps. — AFP/Relaxnews |
| German bin-divers get connected to wage war on food waste Posted: 07 Feb 2013 05:20 PM PST  A supporter of the foodsharing movement searches food in a dumpster behind a supermarket in Berlin. — Reuters pic It is not poverty that inspires a growing number of young Germans like 21-year-old student Benjamin Schmitt to forage for food in the garbage, but anger at loss and waste which the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates at one-third of allfood produced worldwide, every year, valued at about US$1 trillion (RM3 trillion). In environmentally aware, cost-conscious Germany, "foodsharing" is the latest fad, using the Internet to share food recovered from supermarket bins while it is still in good condition. "Dumpster-diving" for society's cast-offs is a fast-growing phenomenon among sub-cultures in Europe and the United States and "freegans" — vegans who do not believe in paying for food — have long been sifting through supermarket wheelie bins. But the "foodsharing" movement that has sprung up in cities like Cologne and Berlin brings efficiency and technical skills to the table in ways that make it uniquely German. More than 8,200 people across Germany have registered to share food on the www.foodsharing.de website in just seven weeks of existence, said Berlin organiser Raphael Fellmer. The website — which has an appropriately recycled-paper look — advises people where there are "baskets" and what is in them: organic sausages in Cologne or spaghetti and Darjeeling tea in Chemnitz. Members can log in or use a Smartphone app to see the address of nearby baskets or a pick-up time and place. They can then rate the transaction like ordinary online retailers.  Vegetables pulled out from waste bins of an organic supermarket. — Reuters pic "I've come for some bread rolls, just a couple," said Frank, an unemployed 47-year-old, who was alerted to the location of a hoard of fresh bread on the website and called at Fellmer's house. Opening his rucksack, he helped himself from a bag of rolls that had been on sale at a nearby bakery till 7pm the previous evening. Taste the waste Throwing away food is a rich country phenomenon but a poor country's problem. Camelia Bucatariu, a policy expert on food waste at the FAO in Rome, said North American and European consumers waste 95-115kg of food per capita a year, compared to just 6-11kg in sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia. As economies develop, the level of food waste grows, said Bucatariu, who is Romanian. The foodsharers' argument that the tonnes of food wasted in Germany could feed people in poor countries is not as simplistic as it sounds: less waste means less drain on resources in the producer countries and less upward pressure on prices, she said.  Raphael Fellmer, a supporter of the foodsharing movement has lunch with his daughter Alma Lucia and his partner Nieves Palmer Muntaner, with food cooked from vegetables collected from waste of an organic supermarket. — Reuters pic The FAO is studying how to change such behaviour and whether changes are needed to legislation on the retailers' "date marks" differentiating "Best By" from "Use By" — the latter being the date when food may start to become a biological hazard. Fellmer is on a three-year-old "money strike": he does not earn or spend a euro and he, his wife and child eat only food that has been rescued from the bins. A rangy 29-year-old in a baggy blue jumper with spiky blond hair and a pointed beard, he is already something of a German media phenomenon. On a recent visit, a TV documentary crew and a reporter from a local daily were crowded into his one-room flat. He plonks on the table a packet of ginger biscuits for Christmas — from a batch of hundreds fished out of bins nearby — bearing a "use by" date which is still a month away. They taste fine, as do some red and gold-wrapped chocolate Santas. The "use by" dates infuriate the foodsharers, many of whom were first inspired by the 2011 film "Taste the Waste" by their guru Valentin Thurm.  A supporter of the foodsharing movement holds a paprika found in a dumpster. — Reuters pic Fellmer's friend Schmitt was brought up in a "very food-conscious vegetarian household". His mother is a food chemist who advises him on hygienic ways to eat and share food from plastic sacks that he admits are sometimes "mushy" under your fingers in the dark. Like Fellmer, he lives not in east Berlin, with its history of squats and communes, but in the leafy western suburb of Dahlem where he bin-dives under the noses of the German capital's most affluent residents. Foodsharing appeals to the "hipster" culture of Berlin with its tradition of anti-establishment protest, Schmitt said. The German crowdsourcing techniques could turn out to be "best practice" for reducing waste in other countries too, said the FAO's Bucatariu. "Solutions may vary according to the culture, the context and to what access to foodthere is," she said. "But each and every one of us can do something." — Reuters |
| You are subscribed to email updates from The Malaysian Insider :: Food To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
0 ulasan:
Catat Ulasan