Richer Europeans least likely to throw away expired food

What would you do if you find a packet of spaghetti in your kitchen with no ‘Best Before’ date, and you cannot remember when you had bought it? 

This was one of the questions put to respondents in a European-wide Eurobarometer survey on food waste.

While over two-thirds (70%) of all Europeans interviewed said that they would use the package regardless of the lack of information, only 57% of Maltese said they would do the same.

Moreover, only 7% of Maltese would use the product regardless of whether the packaging is damaged – compared to 34% of European who would use it anyway.

And while only 24% of Europeans would throw it away, the percentage rises to 37% among the Maltese.

Curiously, it is respondents in richer nations who are most likely to eat the ‘expired’ spaghetti regardless of the lack of information on the package. While only 36% of Romanians and 44% of Greeks would consume the product, 85% of Austrians and 84% of German and French consumers would do likewise.  Moreover, the most likely to throw the product away are the Romanians (56%) and the Greeks (50%).

The Maltese emerge as middle-of-the-road food wasters from the survey, being slightly less likely to throw away their spaghetti than the Cypriots (44%) but less likely to throw it away than the Italians (30%).

The survey also shows that the Maltese are among the most likely to throw away opened food when its storage date expires.

In 23 of the 28 member states, a majority of respondents said that they would continue to use opened food products beyond the recommended storage date if they looked all right. Austria (82%) stands out for the particularly high proportion of respondents who gave this answer. 

However, in Malta (52%), Bulgaria (57%), Cyprus (58%) Greece (60%) and Romania (65%) a majority said that they would throw the food away regardless of how it looked. 

These five countries also had the highest proportion of respondents who said they would throw away unmarked non-perishable goods if they could not ascertain their ‘Best Before’ date. 

Despite the propensity of the general Maltese population to dispose of food when it expires, 6% of the Maltese never check expiry dates. This was also the highest percentage among the countries surveys.

Respondents were asked how they would react if manufacturers removed ‘Best Before’ dates on labels for certain non-perishable foods, such as rice, pasta, coffee and tea, which currently have to be labelled with this information. 

Opinion was very divided on this question at the country level. In Cyprus (77%) and Greece (76%), over three quarters of respondents indicated that they would prefer ‘Best Before’ dates to remain on selected non-perishable items, and in Italy (69%) and Malta (70%) over two-thirds gave this answer. However, in 12 of the 28 Member States, only a minority regarded this information as necessary, with as little as a quarter (25%) giving this response in France, Austria, Netherlands and Germany. 

Once again there was a clear divide at the regional level, with nearly six in ten (58%) of those polled in the new member states saying that they would miss the information, compared with only four in ten (40%) of respondents in original 15 member states. In all but one (Latvia) of the new member states, a majority of those polled regarded ‘Best Before’ labels as necessary.