Big Blog, Big Issue - The Abundance of Waste

A tall, thin man in a white apron and a chef’s hat is teetering on a chair behind the big metal door that leads out from the back of a truly massive staff canteen.  He is staring into an open skip and as I watch him, he starts to shovel the contents of a 3’ by 2’ catering tray of what appears to be an untouched lasagne into the skip.  He follows that up with another one, and then two similar sized trays of what looks like fresh cottage pie, then a full tray of bread and butter pudding.  He then upends a big cardboard box over the lot, and a cascade of still-wrapped sandwiches, cakes and cookies crowns the heap.  He isn’t finished.  He wanders inside, comes out with another box, climbs back onto his chair, and empties at least a dozen unopened cartons of orange juice into the skip. 

It’s 1989.  I’m the big-permed, killer-heeled, shoulder-padded PA to a Director of one of the UK’s biggest corporate giants, at one of their top security manufacturing plants which employs six thousand people, and I've just tottered across from the office with a list of catering requirements for a management meeting scheduled for the following day.   I find myself standing transfixed and totally gobsmacked by what I've just seen.  The guy doesn't see me.  He wipes his hands on his apron, grabs his chair, wanders back inside and slams the metal door.

By the time I get to the front of the building and make my way to the counter, I’m furious.  I ask to speak to the canteen manager, who turns out to be the very same man I've just seen throwing away a truly staggering amount of perfectly good food.  I ask him if what he’s just done is a daily occurrence, and he confirms that he throws away between three and seven trays of untouched fresh food every day.

When I ask him if the food couldn't be produced in smaller quantities, or whether what was left over could be redirected to people who need it, he tells me his directive is to produce certain quantities, and that it’s not feasible to consider distributing what’s not needed in such a way. Not feasible.  He agrees wholeheartedly with my outrage, that while this multi-billion pound industry certainly can afford to have a van stop by outside the security gates each afternoon, and pay staff an extra fifteen minutes’ wages to haul it all up to the gate to have it taken away to the local mission for distribution to the needy, they just choose not to find a way to make it feasible.  He gives me a “what can ya do” shrug, and turns away.

So I go back to my boss and I tell him what's transpired.  He makes a few phone calls to try and see if we can somehow fight our way through the “unfeasibility” of redirecting our unwanted food to the city’s homeless and hungry, but nobody higher up the organisational chain – not one active decision maker - wants to help.  They all have better things to do than concern themselves with yet another dysfunctional element of their operation.  The fact that what is thrown away each day could comfortably feed the city’s homeless or support families in poverty across the county is, apparently, irrelevant.  

Part of me was itching to blow the whistle on the waste of food, but I didn't.  I went home seething but leaving it at that and I guess, looking back, that made me just as guilty and ignorant as everybody else.  It stayed with me though, that encounter, and to this day I still struggle to accept that something couldn't have been done to avoid all that obscene waste, but then, I’m the woman who will see a homeless person sitting hunched outside McDonalds, and go in to buy them a burger and a coffee.  Some people care more than others I suppose, but the issue is not even just about that.

“All to do with Health and Safety”, someone’s mumbling in my ear, and they’d probably be right.  Most of us are well aware of the degree to which Health and Safety legislation has crippled much of what people can do to help themselves or others, despite their best intentions, with certain laws put in place to protect the public being so often underpinned by a monumental abandonment of common sense. It all comes down to forward thinking and adaptable planning, and there never seems to be much of that hanging around when policymakers are drafting decisions about what’s going to help instead of hinder.  I’m certain that most of the hungry and homeless would take a chance on not being poisoned by food pronounced as a “potential risk to health and safety” that had been offered for sale just hours before to paying customers!  It would be nice for them to at least be offered the choice.  Does food really go off that fast?  I don’t think so. 

In our progressive, civilized society, in the 21^st century where technology has literally revolutionized the planet beyond the recognition of generations past, it seems that one of the hardest things for the modern-day mind still to grapple with and find a solution for is the monumental global waste of food.  The United States reportedly wastes almost half of everything it produces, and here in the UK we're not far behind.  Collectively, as householders, we throw away a staggering 4 million tonnes (!) of food and drink per year.  That equates, more or less, to setting £60 on fire per household per month.  That’s more than £700 per year - the price of a fairly decent holiday, a few home improvements, or any number of other things on most people’s wish lists – and well within our grasp if we could just be a bit more careful about how much food we buy that we consistently throw away.  The craziest thing about the whole scenario is that according to research most uneaten food goes straight from the fridge to the bin, and more than half of it could legitimately have been safely eaten.  A food item being past its “use by” date merely means that its quality has started to diminish, NOT that it’s no longer edible or has no nutritional value.  Most of it would still be absolutely fine for consumption, but until the labels make that clear, people will continue to simply bin it, a fact that suits the supermarkets very nicely. 

The worldwide imbalance of food distribution has been a well known fact for many a long decade and although around 4 billion tons of food is produced globally every year, i.e. enough to comfortably feed the entire world, the latest World Food report informs us that an incomprehensible 1.3 billion tons - more than a third of all food globally produced – is either lost or wasted, largely thanks to micro and macro human inefficiency.  While the average consumer undeniably has a lot to answer for, external factors such as inefficient planning for the creation of food, for control over its growth, and for management of its distribution remain central to the issue, along with wildly differing and inconsistent global farming practices that compromise food manufacture, quality, and worldwide availability.

Setting aside the chronic global mismanagement of food, a general, more home-centred lack of education and understanding about our own relationships with it enables us to feel ok about our overflowing supermarket shelves and groaning dinner tables, while people in certain pockets of the world are continuing to die from starvation. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that nearly 870 million people of the world’s population (one in eight), are suffering from chronic undernourishment.  It beggars belief that 870 million people don’t have sufficient food, with 16 million classified as officially undernourished, including those in developing counties.  With much of the world being currently entrenched in the misery of hunger, malnourishment, malnutrition and outright famine, and given the scale of the task being faced by global policy makers, it all might feel too huge and too far outside of our control as individuals, for anything we do to have any significant impact. Well, I don’t agree.  I think there is much that we can do, as individuals and families, to influence their decisions going forward.

For a start, let’s consider how we respond to the behaviour of commercial retailers – supermarkets in particular - who charge disproportionately for smaller packets of everything (a nightmare for people who live alone), and who engage in high profile advertising to offer bulk deals and heavy discounts, encouraging people to buy more than what they really need.  They buy in bulk themselves, to get the prices they want, and they then shift those goods by offering deals to consumers. It’s great when it comes to stocking up on non-perishables, but how many of us have bought more fresh produce or other perishables than we needed because it was cheap, then ended up throwing away what couldn't be frozen for later use, or used up before it went bad in the fridge?  Not so much of a bargain in the end, then!  I’m as guilty as the next person, incidentally, having recently bought three packs of yoghurts on a buy-two-and-get-three deal.  I didn't even pause to consider whether I would even be capable of eating them all before they went bad.  I just thought “I eat this yoghurt!  I will take advantage of this deal”.  Two weeks later I threw the untouched third pack out, because I didn't get to it in time.  It’s not the first time I've done something like that, but I’m hoping it will be one of the last, because I’m starting to appreciate that getting something “free” isn't really a bargain if I can’t use it. 

What if we simply bought what we knew we could manage, or at least found a way to preserve the rest (e.g. freezing) for later use?  What if we stopped ourselves from being heavily seduced by a promise of saving money that turns out to be false if we end up throwing away £60 worth of food per month on average?   

Form most of us, reining in the amount of food we routinely waste means changing our relationship with it.  It’s a process that starts with recognizing, at the point of purchase, what is realistic for us to consume and sticking to it.  I've made a start by planning my family’s meals, simply by making lists of what fresh ingredients I realistically need, and sticking to it. If we only need one pack of yoghurts, I resist the temptation to buy two, in order to get three.  I have to say that this is proving to be a REALLY tough habit to break, because like many people I have been conditioned to saving money wherever I can.  But on reading the food waste statistics (which are rampant on the internet for anyone who wants to look), the penny is starting to drop.  Can I use £700 a year more effectively than tossing it into the bin?  Hell yes!  Show me one person who couldn't!

Changing our relationship with food also means thinking beyond the quantities we buy, to how much we actually consume, and this can also be a very tough habit to break, because a lot of what we think about food goes right back to how we were conditioned within our family of origin.  I grew up under constant threat of punishment if I didn't eat everything dished up on my plate.  “Think of the starving millions”, was the swift and snappy rejoinder if I ever dared to declare that I wasn't hungry enough to finish what was on my plate and woe betide me if I left even half a spoonful of over-boiled cabbage on my plate!  Too many of us grew up with that ethic.  You ate what you were given, whether you liked it or not, whether there was too much of it or not, and whether you complained or not.  It was enforced with the best of intentions, since my generation of children was dealing with the aftermath of our parents’ own childhood experiences of food deprivation during war-time rationing, where the waste of food was, quite rightly, an abomination.  Old habits are hard to break, and the ticking time-bomb of obesity is as much about the quantity we've been conditioned to think we need, as the actual nutritional value of what we eat.  Most of us can actually get by on a lot less, as long as it’s healthy, nutritional food.

 

But here’s the thing:  The waste of food is STILL an abomination, it is out of control, and if the United Nations’ prediction is true, that by 2075 there will be another 3 billion mouths to feed world-wide, it’s pretty clear that the human race has to get a lot more sensible a lot more quickly about effective food production, distribution and consumption.  Many of us won’t be around by 2075, having shuffled off our mortal coils thanks to various illnesses, many of which will be directly or indirectly related to how and what we've eaten throughout our lives.  It’s the current generation of children that will be faced with the problem of how to feed the burgeoning hungry.  They are going to need a lot of help, and it needs to start NOW, with US. 

Adequate food should be a basic human right, not a matter of luck, location or happenstance and while food banks all over the country are feeling an ever-increasing burden to provide for struggling people, the routine nationwide wastage of enough food to feed them twice over is a situation that should not be allowed to continue, no matter who’s doing it, or “why”.  

Blanket policy changes are what’s really needed, for people to be far more positively supported to either have enough food, or to offer what they don’t need to those who do, but until that happens, we have to be content with making a commitment to doing what we can within our own orbits to help influence the necessary global change.  Recognizing deceptive deals and refusing to be seduced by them and being more realistic about how much food we really need will not just reduce the amount we send to landfill or compost.  They are important kick-start behaviours to a process that will ultimately force suppliers to change the habits that influence the producers even further up a food chain that simply isn't working, in its current state. 

As consumers, we are part of a chain of dominoes.  We have more power than we might first think we have, to force a more sustainable and humanely distributed food chain.  For the sake of current health and welfare, and for that of future generations, we need to start using that power.