Litnet

Just past midnight behind a Berlin supermarket, two youngsters with flashlights strapped to their woolen hats sift through trash cans for food that is still edible, load their bikes with bread, vegetables and chocolate Santas and cycle off into the darkness.

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 U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates at one-third of all food produced worldwide, every year, valued at about $1 trillion.

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 organizer 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.

Camelia Bucatariu, a policy expert on food waste at the FAO in Rome, said North American and European consumers waste 95-115 kg of food per capita a year, compared to just 6-11 kg 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 tons 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.