Brazil prosecutors investigate plan to give reconstituted food to poor people

[Judi Lynn]

São Paulo’s mayor claimed powder made from food close to its sell-by date was a cost-free way to tackle hunger but critics denounced it as ‘human pet food’

Dom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
@domphillips
Thursday 19 October 2017 15.07 EDT

Prosecutors in Brazil’s biggest city have opened an inquiry into a controversial plan to feed poorer citizens and schoolchildren with a flour made out of food close to its sell-by date that critics have described as “human pet food”.

João Doria, the populist, conservative mayor of São Paulo, and the city’s Catholic cardinal, Dom Odilo Scherer, have said that the product, called farinata (farinha is flour in Portuguese), will help alleviate hunger at no cost to the city’s government.

But prosecutors have demanded more information about the nutritional content of the new food and what testing, if any, has been done after concerns were raised by the Regional Council of Nutritionists and other bodies.

“There is an uncertainly over the nutritional value of this food,” José Bonilha, a São Paulo state prosecutor, told the Guardian. “What were the tests and the documents that authorised the announcement of its introduction?”

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/19/sao-paulo-brazil-human-pet-food-hunger