The Bread That Costs More to Give Away

Picture a bakery late in the evening. Any city will do. On the shelf, loaves and rolls baked this morning. Still good. Still soft to the touch. In an hour, they'll come off the display and go to the landfill.

The owner isn't greedy. And they aren't stupid. It's just that giving this bread away would cost them more than throwing it out.

That sounds absurd. So look at the scale. The Food and Agriculture Organization, the United Nations food agency, estimates that about a third of all the food produced in the world is lost or thrown away. And in Russia, retail sends to the bin up to a fifth of goods that someone could have eaten.

Now, why would giving bread away cost money? Here's the catch. Under Russian law, handing over goods for free counts as selling them. And a sale means value added tax, which works much like a sales tax. So the baker owes tax on bread nobody paid for.

The obvious question: why not call it a gift and forget the tax? Because to the tax office, a gift costs exactly the same as a sale. Only there's no income to pay it from. Sell the bread, and the money covers the tax. Give it away, and you pay the same tax with nothing coming in.

So the bin wins.

Enter the volunteers. In Saint Petersburg there's a movement called "Otdam darom edu." Roughly: "I'll give food away for free." It isn't a handful of enthusiasts. It's tens of thousands of people.

Every evening they drive up to bakeries, markets, small shops. They take what would otherwise end up in the bin. And they pass it on to people who need it, or simply want it. No trade. No money. Just a list of pickup points and a schedule of visits, put together by the volunteers themselves.

Notice how it works. It isn't a purchase. And it isn't a donation made in a company's name. It's hand to hand, in the evening, at the back door.

While the law figures out how to count charity, this work is done by hand. By people with backpacks.

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