Poll: Many Czechs use food past its expiry date

A poll conducted by the CVVM agency shows that the majority of Czechs could gain a lot by planning their meals better. Food constitutes about 30 percent of household waste and while many people throw food away because they no longer feel like eating it, others eat food that is past its expiry date.

Photo: Scot Nelson via Foter.com / CC BY

The results of a CVVM survey published by the CTK news agency may come as a bit of a shock. While many people still throw away food for no good reason, others consume products past their expiry date. According to the poll results, 86 percent of people consider food wasting a problem, but few Czechs still plan ahead well enough to avoid it. Less than a quarter of respondents said they do not throw out food at all, while half of those polled said they do not throw out more than 10 percent of the food they buy.

It is estimated that about 6.4 percent of overall food production gets trashed, which is relatively little when compared to other EU countries, but it still amounts to more than 254,000 tons of food. In other words 25 kilograms of food per capita is wasted annually in a country of over 10 million people.

The poll also revealed that close to half of Czechs (48 percent) sometimes consume food past its best by date and a third of them consume products such as meat and milk which go bad quickly past their expiry date. Some respondents even confuse the two labels.

Respondents widely agreed in that they wanted to limit food wasting, the vast majority of them for financial reasons, although half of those polled mentioned the ethical and social aspects of the problem as well.