A group of young people advocating food-sharing yesterday gathered in New Taipei City’s Yonghe District (永和) for a cooking activity that turned leftover food into palatable dishes.
About 20 people took part in the event, which the New Taipei City Urban and Rural Development Department called “a kind of social experiment” it is aiming to promote.
Participants were encouraged to bring surplus food to cook or exchange with other people, said Ann Huang (黃尹宣), founder of the Pick Food Up kitchen.
She said she came upon the idea when studying at the Slow Food organization in Italy.
Many food products are discarded long before they are inedible, she said, pointing at a box of tomatoes that looked inedible, but was totally fine for making sauce.
About 36,880 tonnes of edible food are discarded annually by supermarkets and restaurants, Food and Drug Administration data released in May last year showed.
Before the event, Huang said she had contacted restaurants and food suppliers to see whether they could offer food for free, but was met mostly with silence.
“Many people on the Internet say you are doing a good thing, but few of them would join you in the real world,” she said, adding that food sharing is growing in Taiwan, but very slowly.
Social issues such as environmental protection and human rights are inseparable, and reducing food waste is a simple thing that people can do in their daily lives, Foodsharing Taiwan member Hsieh Tsung-yu (謝琮宇) said.
Taiwan might be China’s next target after it has “walled off” Hong Kong from the rest of the world with its new national security legislation, Academia Sinica Institute of Sociology fellow Wu Jieh-min (吳介民) said on Thursday. At a seminar organized by the Economic Democracy Union, the Taiwan Association for Human Rights, the Hong Kong Outlanders and the Judicial Reform Foundation, Wu said that the legislation is simultaneously a fig leaf concealing Beijing’s autocratic rule in Hong Kong and a figurative “Berlin Wall,” denying democratic countries access to Hong Kong. Wu said it is evident that Taiwan would be China’s next target. The
SAFETY CONCERNS: A construction company working nearby admitted to negligence in the incident, and is to pay a fine and other expenses related to damages Residents of homes adjacent to an alleyway in New Taipei City’s Yonghe District (永和) on Saturday were forced to evacuate their homes after the road collapsed, the New Taipei City government said yesterday. An 80m by 4m area in an alleyway on Wenhua Road (文化路) collapsed at 10:39am near an apartment building construction site where work was being done on the project’s foundation. The incident also ruptured an underground gas pipe and tilted several buildings in the area. Residents would not be able to return to their homes until tomorrow or Wednesday, when repairs are expected to be finished, the city government said. Workers
CHALLENGER DEEP: Lin Ying-Tsong was invited by Caladan Oceanic founder Victor Vescovo to join him on a 10-hour long trip in the company’s submersible Taiwanese-American Lin Ying-Tsong (林穎聰) last month became the first person from Asia and the 12th in human history to dive into the deepest part on Earth, the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. Lin, 45, an expert in deep sea acoustics with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts, joined US adventurer and Caladan Oceanic founder Victor Vescovo, 54, on June 22 in a descent to the central pool of the Challenger Deep, the deepest point of the trench, which lies at a depth of more than 10,900m. The pair made the descent in a submersible named Limiting Factor, a US$37
ARMS RACE: Two DPP lawmakers said that China’s development model differed from Taiwan’s, as it aims to become a global hegemon, while Taiwan seeks to protect itself Taiwanese national defense experts are split on how Taiwan should respond to the ever-growing budget of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), with some advocating for Taiwan to increase defense spending, while others say that little can be done. The Legislative Yuan approved NT$358 billion (US$12.1 billion) for national defense spending across fiscal 2020, a 3.47 percent increase compared with last year, while China’s military budget this year is NT$5.4 trillion, more than 15 times that of Taiwan. Regardless of whether the government adopts a zero-based budgeting method for national defense spending — in which all expenses are justified and approved each
RSS