WASHINGTON, D.C._U.S. Congress returns to work this week after a long holiday break. First District Congresswoman Chellie Pingree says her top personal priority for this session is her bill attempting to tackle the problem of food waste. One of the issues taken up in the bill, will be the perhaps overly-cautious freshness dates on some products.
"We are going to be working hard on that," says Pingree, "looking for co-sponsors on both sides of the aisle and working with everybody from the grocer associations to farming groups to try and change the expiration dates, the kind of way we go about putting expiration dates on food so, so much does not get thrown away."
Pingree says perfectly good food is being thrown in the trash.
"The statistics are staggering. We waste about 40 percent of the food that we produce in this country and at the same time we have fifty million people who are struggling with hunger so our feeling is if we could waste less of that food we could feed a lot of those families."
Pingree says she has been getting bipartisan interest in the legislation.
