Cafe serving discarded food opens in Britain’s Bristol
London: A cafe opened this week in the English city of Bristol, dishing up meals made from thrown-away supermarket food rescued from waste skips.
Discarded food from some of the city’s restaurants is also being recycled at Bristol’s newest eatery, Skipchen, a play on the word kitchen, Xinhua reported.
Eager diners are happy to munch their way through thrown-away food, especially as they themselves will decide how much, if anything, they should pay for their meals.
Skipchen is being run as a not-for-profit cafe by campaigners who want to highlight the amount of edible food thrown away every day.
The menu, which changes daily, has already included lobster, gorgonzola omelettes and seafood platters.
Cafe manager Sam Joseph said: “We have a real mix of people coming to the cafe and they sit on two long tables. You could have a businessman sitting next to someone who is a homeless person.”
“People sometimes think they will be taking food from the needy when they come to us but the truth is there is so much to go round. People used to share food in the past with their neighbours, but there’s now embarrassment around it. We’re offering a way to stop it going to waste.”
The cafe has already made a deal with a leading restaurant chain to take surplus chicken from its branches in the local area.
Skipchen is based in Stokes Croft, a wealthy suburb of Bristol, which has already seen the arrival of trendy restaurants and cafe bars.
“The ultimate aim is to put ourselves out of business; if we get to the stage where there is no surplus food then there will be no need for us to be here,” Joseph said.
“We go around the supermarkets when they are closing for the night and the unwanted stock is being thrown out. I think there is nothing wrong with taking food that would be thrown out and serving it to people who cannot afford to eat. I think it would be immoral and unethical to make a profit from the cafe, what we are trying to do is make a statement,” he added.
The menu in the cafe is short and to the point and is determined by what the staff can get their hands on at any given time.
All staff members work voluntarily, the idea being that food is mainly redistributed to people who need it the most. (IANS)
Apple world’s most valuable brand followed by Google
Washington: Apple has outshone Google as the world”s most valuable brand for the second year in a row, a report said. Valued at 118.9 billion dollars, Apple pushed its brand value by 21 percent year-on-year and was closely followed by Google that has been valued at 107.43 billion, recording a 15 percent increase from last year, reported the CNN.
The two are the only brands to have been valued at more than 100 billion dollars. The annual Best Global Brands report was compiled by Interbrand consultancy and was based on three criteria including, financial performance of branded products, the brand’s influence on customer choice and whether it can push up the price of a product. Jez Frampton, Interbrand”s CEO, said that the meteoric rise recorded by the two companies was truly a testament to “the power of brand building.” Other tech companies featured amid the top 10 included, IBM (4), Microsoft (5) and Samsung (8). (ANI)
Brewery slammed for promoting beer with boobs ‘Got cans?’ campaign
Washington: A Southern California-based craft brewery has been slammed for promoting their newly launched six-pack with boobs via “Got cans?” campaign.
The Facebook post by Mother Earth Brew Co. reads “Since the dawn of humanity we have been sustained by nourishment from our mothers. But never has such nourishment been so convenient and publicly acceptable. Love your cans. Love your Mother,” Fox News reported.
The craft brewery is accused of sexism and also some people find it tongue in cheek way to refer the breast feeding movement. One online user wrote “Aaaaaaand that’s the last Mother Earth I ever drink, while another wrote that it was an impassioned post that shamed Mother Earth for being “out of touch with its female clientele” and asked guys to think before defending the ad. (ANI)
US mother charged after daughter brings heroin to daycare
SAN FRANCISCO: A Delaware mother was arrested on Monday after her four-year-old daughter unknowingly brought roughly 250 packets of heroin to her daycare, and passed them out to classmates thinking they were candy, police said.
Ashley Tull, 30, of Selbyville was charged with drug possession and endangering the welfare of a child after her daughter brought the drugs to the Hickory Tree Child Care Center on Monday morning, Delaware state police said in a statement.
Several of the children who received the small, unopened bags were taken to area hospitals as a precaution, and were later released, police said.
Police said the child unknowingly brought the heroin to the care center in a replacement backpack, after hers was ruined by a family pet the night before.
Tull was released from jail after posting $6,000 bond, police said. She has been barred from coming into contact with her 4-year-old, or her two other children, aged 9 and 11.
The investigation into the incident is ongoing, police said. (Agencies)
Second tiger freed by Putin found near Sino-Russian
Beijing: The second of the three rare tigers set free by Russian President Vladimir Putin was found wandering around the Sino-Russian border while hunt is on for the other one, official media reported here on Friday.
The Siberian tiger, Ilona, was observed at a location less than five kilometres from the Heilongjiang River along the Sino-Russian border, Eugene Simonov, coordinator with Rivers without Boundaries Coalition, a multinational non-governmental organisation told state-run Xinhua news agency. Simonov said he received a message from Russia yesterday morning and the tiger, tagged with a tracking device, was found moving toward China over the previous three days.
It remains unclear whether Ilona has entered China like Kuzya, another Siberian tiger that allegedly roamed into China earlier this month after it was released by Putin in May. China launched a massive hunt for it in the forests. Chen Zhigang, director of the nature reserve, said yesterday that personnel had been dispatched to remove traps and set up more than 60 cameras in the hope of capturing the tiger’s image. Simonov said parties in the region should have a contingency plan as soon as possible in case the tiger is trapped. Fewer than 500 Siberian tigers remain in the wild, mainly in eastern Russia, northeast China and northern parts of the Korean Peninsula. China puts its own number of wild Siberian tigers between 18 and 22, mostly living in the border areas. Simonov and zoologists have called for establishing a nature reserve on the Sino-Russian border to prevent inbreeding among the endangered species. “We have been talking about the cross-border nature reserve for years. It would be highly conducive to the protection of Siberian tigers,” Simonov said. Wildlife expert Ma Jianzhang, who is also an academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said it was not uncommon for wild Siberian tigers to cross the border. (PTI)