Brazil prosecutors investigate plan to give reconstituted food to poor people

Sio 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'

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".

Joio Doria, the populist, conservative mayor of Sio 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.