Figures from FAO show that about one third of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted each year

By Michael Saunders

LONDON, Aug 2 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A British couple committed to tackling the massive amount of food wasted daily will be serving their wedding guests a meal with a difference this weekend - everything has been thrown out by local food stores.

Environmentally-friendly couple Nicola Hedges and Christopher McKenna are making a bold statement when getting married in Northampton in central England on Aug. 6.

The bride and groom will feed their 80 guests with a meal for "freegans" - defined in the Oxford Dictionaries as people seeking to help the environment by reducing waste, especially by retrieving and using discarded food and other goods.

Elsie's Caf, the local restaurant catering for the wedding, said only recycled food would be served on the happy day.

"It's the first rubbish wedding we have ever done," the cafe's co-owner Shena Cooper told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Elsie's Caf serves meals made from ingredients deemed either damaged or past their sell-by date by supermarkets and other local food stores.

Figures from the United Nations' food agency, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), show that about one third - or 1.3 billion tonnes - of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted each year.

These losses and waste amount to about US$680 billion in industrialized countries and US$310 billion in developing countries, the FAO said.

Hedges, 48, a nursery worker told the local newspaper, the Northampton Chronicle & Echo, that everything at the wedding would be reusable and recyclable, with a purple wedding dress bought off EBay and wild flowers donated by friends and family.

"Hooray to using rubbish food," Hedges wrote on her Twitter account.

($1 = 0.7493 pounds)

(Editing by Belinda Goldsmith; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)

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