http://www.seoul.co.kr/news/newsView.php?id=20141128012003&spage=1
2014년 11월 28일, 서울신문, 박성숙 기자 보도
독일엔 있다, 거리 냉장고…독일엔 없다, 버리는 음식…유럽에 번진다, 푸드 셰어링
독일에 가면 멀쩡한 냉장고가 시내 길모퉁이에 생뚱맞게 놓여 있는 모습을 볼지도 모른다. 냉장고를 열면 당근, 양배추, 감자, 빵, 버터 등이 가득 채워져 있을 것이다. 냉장고가 집 밖으로 나오게 된 사연은 무엇일까.
| ▲ 출처 뉴욕타임스 |
뉴욕타임스는 26일(현지시간) ‘길거리 냉장고’는 음식물을 개인끼리 나누기 위한 것으로, 최근 독일에서 음식물 쓰레기를 줄이기 위한 음식 공유(푸드셰어링) 운동이 확산되고 있다고 전했다. 기존의 먹거리 나눔은 끼니를 해결하지 못하는 빈곤층을 위한 것이었으나 독일의 푸드셰어링은 차원이 다르다. 신문에 따르면 독일 전역에 음식물 공유 장소는 약 100군데로, 이곳에는 냉장고나 선반이 놓여 있다. 사람들은 혼자 다 먹기 어려운 재료들, 손대지 않은 파티용 음식들을 가져와 냉장고를 채우거나 필요할 때 가져갈 수 있다.
이 운동은 영화제작자이자 저널리스트인 발렌틴 턴에 의해 2년 전 시작됐다. 2010년 그가 찍은 ‘쓰레기를 맛보자’(Taste the Waste)라는 제목의 다큐멘터리는 전국적으로 큰 파장을 일으켰다. 약간 시들었다고 통째 버려진 양상추, 여전히 신선해 보이는 토마토와 롤빵 등이 가득 담긴 쓰레기통과 못생겨서 슈퍼마켓 진열대에 오르지 못하고 밭에서 썩어가는 감자를 앞에 둔 농부의 애끓는 인터뷰는 음식물 쓰레기를 줄여야 한다는 공감대와 행동을 촉발하는 시금석이 됐다.
음식 공유 사이트인 ‘푸드셰어링’(Foodsharing.de)은 그렇게 해서 탄생했다. 현재 정규 회원만 5만 5000명에 달하며 이들이 지난 한 해 아낀 음식물 양만 1000t에 달한다고 신문은 전했다. 푸드셰어링은 연쇄반응을 일으켰다. 또 하나의 음식물 절약 사이트(Lebensmittelretten.de)가 출연했다. ‘푸드 세이버’로 명명된 사이트 회원들은 채소 가게나 빵집 등과 협력해 그날 팔지 못하고 남은 재료들을 거둬가 이웃과 나눈다. 독일뿐 아니라 이웃 오스트리아, 스위스 등지까지 확산해 ‘푸드 세이버’로 활약하는 사람만 9000명가량이며 독일에서만 상점 1000곳이 동참하고 있다.
‘디너 익스체인지 베를린’은 레스토랑과 농산물 매장에서 미처 사용하지 못한 재료들을 가져와 케이터링(음식배달) 서비스를 하는 곳이다. 몇 달 전 베를린에 문을 연 레스토랑 ‘큘리너리 미스피츠’는 단순히 모양 때문에 상품성을 상실해 쓰레기가 될 운명에 처한 채소를 농가에서 직접 공급받아 요리한다. 턴은 “먹거리 나눔이 끼치는 영향은 아직 제한적이며 음식물 쓰레기 방지를 위한 온전한 해결책이라고는 생각하지 않는다”면서 “중요한 것은 이를 통해 사람들의 생각을 바꾸는 것”이라고 말했다.
박상숙 기자 alex@seoul.co.kr
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Finding Takers for Lonely Leftovers in a Culinary Nook of the Sharing Economy
BERLIN — Fresh from a bracing workout at the gym, Anton Kaiser gazed hungrily into a refrigerator, considering arugula, pineapple jam, salted butter and two bags of green grapes before reaching for a white bread roll, baked that morning. “I haven’t eaten all day,” he said, “so it’s great.”
Perhaps best of all, it was free, available in the middle of a graffitied courtyard in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. Like the rest of the offerings in this so-called food sharing refrigerator, Mr. Kaiser’s bread roll would, under normal circumstances, have gone straight into the trash.
But in Germany, where concern about wasted food has mounted in recent years, such refrigerators — stocked with leftovers from private parties and restaurants, and open to the public — are just one of several initiatives aimed at keeping edibles out of the garbage.
There are roughly 100 of these food sharing sites in Germany. About 50 have refrigerators, and the rest are just shelves. They are a small, offline branch of Foodsharing.de, a two-year-old Internet platform that gives members a chance to connect with other food sharers online, should they find themselves in possession of an extra cabbage or, as one Foodsharing post put it, “too many delicious organic potatoes for one person to eat.”
Strangely shaped vegetables. Gordon Welters for The New York Times
“Sometimes people go on vacation, and they realize they have a refrigerator full of food they can’t finish,” said Valentin Thurn, 51, who was a founder of the site, which now has 55,000 regular users. “Or they have a party, and there’s too much food left over afterward.”
A filmmaker and journalist, Mr. Thurn had not planned to start a food revolution, or even a sharing website. But while shooting a segment about Dumpster-diving, he was shocked by what he encountered. “The feeling I had, when I saw the great amount of edible food in the bins, was anger,” he said.
His documentary, “Taste the Waste,” which was released in 2010, struck a chord in Germany. With its images of discarded lettuce, bins of bright, red tomatoes and entire warehouses of old bread, as well as emotional interviews with German farmers about potatoes that — whether too big, too small or too strangely shaped for supermarket shelves — simply rot in fields, the film became a touchstone for the burgeoning movement to reduce the wasting of food.
The idea to share food online came up soon after. “I’m a filmmaker,” Mr. Thurn said. “But people on our team said to me: ‘They are sharing everything on the Internet. Why don’t we share food?’ ”
For safety, Mr. Thurn and his team established a few basic rules. Nothing with a “sell by” date can be shared; no fresh meat or fish is allowed; prepared food is fine, but salads that have been left out all day in the sun are not. As a rule of thumb, people should share food that they would want to eat themselves.
Under German laws regulating food distribution, sharing food between individuals is allowed. But the food sharing refrigerators and shelves operate for the most part under the radar. While there have been problems with members being rude or greedy, Mr. Thurn said, so far no one has complained of getting sick.
City officials in Berlin, which has 12 such sites, did shut one down last year because no group or person was overseeing it and documenting where the food came from, to ensure that it was safe, as required by law.
In December, Foodsharing.de will incorporate another German website,Lebensmittelretten.de. Dedicated to saving food, the site was founded by Raphael Fellmer, 31, who as a university student was so upset by an article he read about wasted food that he decided to stop shopping for groceries altogether.
Working directly with organic grocers, bakeries and other stores, food savers head out in teams to pick up food, whether slightly wilted parsnips, blemished grapefruit or overripe avocados, just before the rejects end up in the trash.
It really gives you a sense of the value of food,” said Lilo Brisslinger of Berlin, one of an estimated 9,000 food savers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. To qualify as a food saver, Ms. Brisslinger, 26, who holds a master’s degree in Islamic studies, had to take a quiz. Punctuality is one of the main requirements, so prospective savers are tested on what to do in case of vacations or forgetting a pickup appointment. (“Our goal is 100 percent reliability,” Mr. Fellmer said. “Otherwise store managers feel like, ‘Aha, those hippies again.’ ”)
At least once a week, Ms. Brisslinger collects everything from lentil soups to bakery sweets from a small organic shop near her apartment. What she cannot eat she leaves in a food sharing corner at a nearby tea store, or gives to people asking for money on trains.
Two neighbors, other single women in their 20s, always gladly accept the extras. “I feel I can make people happy,” Ms. Brisslinger said. “It’s not a lot of work, just some time to go to the shop.”
Georg Kaiser, 47, chief executive of Bio Company, a chain of slick organic markets that are among the 1,000 German stores working with the food savers, said he welcomed the opportunity to reduce his company’s waste. “For me, personally, it’s a question of respect for people and the earth,” he said. “Even if it’s not sellable, it’s still good food.”
In the past year, food savers and sharers kept about 1,000 tons of food from the trash, organizers said. “Of course, if you look nationwide, this is nothing,” Mr. Thurn said. “I wouldn’t consider food sharing the solution. What’s more important than the rescued kilos is to change the way people think.”
Sandra Teitge, one of the founders of Dinner Exchange Berlin, a project that caters meals using produce left over at shops or farmers markets at the end of a day, said she believed that overabundance had led not just to waste, but also to a lack of creativity and flexibility.
“We are used to eating and buying what we want, exactly when we want it,” she said. “I grew up in East Berlin, and in East Germany, you didn’t really have much. But we still managed to eat nice things.”
Culinary Misfits, a cafe that opened in Berlin four months ago, hopes to address the problem of food waste from another angle. Working directly with farmers to procure three-legged carrots and knobby potatoes that supermarkets reject, the two designers behind Culinary Misfits hope to show that a beet the size of a soccer ball is just as delicious as a standard one.
“All of these supermarket carrots, they’re like soldiers in their plastic bags,” said Lea Brumsack, one of the cafe’s owners. “What people buy, it’s not natural. And it leads to, you can buy a perfectly shaped apple from New Zealand at the store, but just outside of Berlin, the trees are weighed down with apples nobody is picking.”
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