Food & Drink: Why Are We Wasting? PDF

# Food & Drink: Why Are We Wasting? ## Food & Drink: Why are We Wasting? ### Good food is going into bins, landfill and incinerators * Enough food is produced in the world so that no-one should go hungry. * Rich countries like the UK and the USA have on their grocery shelves, at any one time, t...

# Food & Drink: Why Are We Wasting? ## Food & Drink: Why are We Wasting? ### Good food is going into bins, landfill and incinerators * Enough food is produced in the world so that no-one should go hungry. * Rich countries like the UK and the USA have on their grocery shelves, at any one time, twice as much food as is needed. * If you were to include the grain used to feed livestock, which would feed humans more efficiently, that figure would rise to three or four times what we need. * Our problem is not under-production, but our wasteful use of resources and our uneven distribution. We are guilty of being unaware of starvation and under-nourishment in the developing world, as well as food poverty within richer nations. * Yet, we willingly discard good, nutritious food produced with valuable resources. * So why are we wasting so much? ### Some Issues: * How much food do you and the people in your household waste? * What can you do to make sure you waste less food? * Why do you think that wasting food is such an important issue? * How should supermarkets change what they do? * What action should the government take on this issue? ### Starting with the soil * In developing countries, most food is produced by small-scale farmers. * The crops are vulnerable to extreme weather (including the results of climate change), pests, poor farming methods, lack of infrastructure, and poor transport and storage. * The majority of spoilage and waste occurs before the produce can reach the consumer. * UK farmers share few of these problems. Our weather can be challenging but generally they store it correctly and transport it easily. * For our farmers, the problem comes with retailers and consumers, not in the soil, but the shops. ### Wasting Food * Big supermarkets are convinced that we, as consumers, like to see perfect produce. * They will reject a whole crop of vegetables because of blemishes or because the individual items are not "perfect". * This is more than a rumour that Prosecco is in short supply. * Scandalously, leftover food is placed in locked bins or has bleach poured over it so that it cannot be re-used. * Supermarkets find it cheaper to send food to incinerators than to redistribute it to charities. * This results in tons of edible food being scrapped. * The cut-throat price wars between supermarkets also mean that they drive down farm gate prices and will make last-minute demands that cannot be accommodated. ### Buy One, Throw One Away * But if supermarkets are the villains, households are at least accomplices. * Almost 50% of food wasted in the UK comes straight from our homes. * Waste is part of our way of life. Supermarkets may tempt us, but they sometimes bargain - buy one, get one free - multipacks, supersize, all contribute both excess consumption and to waste. * And our over-buying feeds back into a food chain dedicated to over-supply. * One weekly binge can lead us to false economies and overestimating our needs. ### Fussy Eaters * Along with changed shopping habits come changed eating habits. * We throw more away because we buy more food in packages and have also lost confidence in our ability to judge when food is actually 'off'. * We rely on sell-by and use-by dates which err very strongly on the side of caution. It is, after all, in the suppliers' interests for us to throw something away and buy it again. * With fresh food, we are put off by small bruises and bumps that we could easily cut out. * We are simply prepared to see unused food go into a bin and then into landfill because there is always more. * We are consuming more calories through larger portion size. Our food is richer, more varied, and at the same time, cheaper than ever before - and we are throwing it away. * We are changing consumption habits from Tristram Stuart in his TED Talk, “The Global Food Waste Scandal". He counted 13,000 slices of bread in a factory skip. * This was fresh bread, baked that day. They were there because they were crusts and those aren't used for packaged sandwiches. * 13,000 every day! * Humans aren't the only ones whose eating habits have changed. In the past, pigs were routinely fed on scraps left over from human meals. They efficiently converted that unwanted food into delicious pork in a traditional virtuous circle. * However, since the outbreak of foot and mouth disease, this is no longer allowed in Europe and instead, expensive soya has to be imported so that we can continue to enjoy a bacon butty. ### What’s the problem? * The fact that we can produce more food than we eat is actually a human success story. * The fact that we aren't all living at a subsistence level is a triumph of human development and has allowed more progress to take place. You can hardly imagine the development of art, science and technology if we were all obliged to scrape a bare living from the soil. * A stable supply of sufficient food is the key to human progress and creativity. * But that surplus exists only in part of our world. * And the need to maintain it places demands on land, water and fuel, which are actually destroying essential elements of our ecosystem such as forests and underground reservoirs. ### And Now… * There's something of a fightback. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has fronted BBC programmes about waste, particularly of vegetables and fish. In February 2016, France brought in a law to force supermarkets to donate unsold food to charities and food banks, a move which, it is hoped, will spread throughout the European Union. * In the UK there is a voluntary agreement between the government and the big supermarkets. In March 2016, Tesco announced that it would donate all its unsold food to charity via the FareShare organisation. Morrisons had announced its own distribution scheme the previous year. * In the UK, organisations such as FareShare and FoodCycle use surplus food to eliminate waste and to create meals for people, promoting, as FoodCycle says, "the simple idea that food waste and food poverty should not coexist.” * Another organisation, Feedback, combines campaigning, research and advice to reduce waste throughout the food system. * One of its projects, the Gleaning Network, works at farm level doing the traditional job of collecting produce left behind in the fields. * There are also people who aim to live entirely without contributing to the food production system. * Freegans use “urban dumpster diving” to provide for foraging, sometimes called "dumpster diving", to provide food that others of us don't need to go that far but we can contribute to a more rational use of food resources. * There is a simple way that we can contribute to the solution for the sake of our-health, our environment and our humanity: we should only buy what we need and use all of what we buy. ### 13,000 slices of bread in a factory skip. * This was fresh bread, baked that day.