Why Food Waste Turns My Stomach
You remember the mess our dear government made with the Free School Meals scheme in January? How the £30 vouchers parents could spend however they chose were swapped for a “hamper” put together by a company that had clearly never experienced a child’s eating habits before?
Yes, that one. It was a catastrophe. Google it if you don’t know what I’m talking about, because I don’t specifically want to dwell on that here - I’m bringing it up for context because it provides a very startling backdrop to an issue that we really need to focus on as we progress into the 2020s and climate preservation, hopefully, becomes a higher priority for everyone.
I want to talk about the fact that we have a systemic problem with the way we interact with food in this country. The Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) released a report last year that explains in blunt reality just how much food the UK has wantonly disposed of in the last few years, how it has been wasted, and by whom. It quickly reveals that in 2018 we as a nation wasted 6.65 million tonnes of food. That’s too huge a number to comprehend. I tried to convert it into elephants or something to give it some scope, but… let’s just say it’s too many elephants.
(You can read the full report here, if you’re interested)
When I started working for an organisation that deals directly with food waste, that number astounded me. It’s huge. I couldn’t comprehend how we’d managed it - surely it’s the supermarkets, right? Or restaurants, the hospitality industry. Any of those huge, money-driven, profit-chasing conglomerates you’d care to think of. It’s becoming increasingly apparent in today’s world that these are largely responsible for destroying our planet, so it would be lovely for the same to be true for food waste. Then it could remain a big abstract dilemma that isn’t directly my problem.
But alas my friend, it is not. Sure, retail and hospitality don’t help matters, but WRAP estimates that 70% of the food wasted in the UK in 2018 was thrown away in the household. You read that right. 70%. They reckon that about a fifth of all the food we purchased that year ended up in the bin, while still in edible condition.
Retail, by contrast, was responsible for just 3% of food waste in 2018. Which is a huge improvement on previous years, and proves that the steps supermarkets are taking to reduce wastage are working.
So, to grossly oversimplify the numbers and create a general average:
The Office for National Statistics says there were 52.5 million adults living in the UK by the end of 2018, which means that each one of them wasted 125KG's worth of food in those 12 months. If you want me to continue with my strange animal weight comparison, that’s about the same as an adult panda bear. We each wasted a panda’s weight of food in 2018.
This is the problem we have - we, as individual people, are wasting food, and we’re wasting it in vast quantities, every single day, as a result of the way we live our lives.
Now, I’m sure you’re wondering at this point what all these statistics have to do with the Free School Meals hampers being so shit, and my answer to you is - absolutely nothing. I brought that up because when I heard about it, I was completely astonished by it. We are throwing away 6.65 million tonnes of food a year, and yet somehow we can’t find a way to get decent food to children in low-income families? That is bullshit. The United Kingdom has one of the wealthiest, most powerful economies in the world. What the fuck is going on.
One potential cause of this problem could be precisely because we’re one of the wealthiest and most powerful economies in the world. Waste is a symbol of wealth, after all - humans discard the things that aren’t of value to them. Clearly, high food waste figures reflect the fact that we’re doing well as a country.
Except we’re not. Despite our national wealth, there is a huge divide between rich and poor and people go hungry in the UK all the time. I hope that the Free School Meals hamper disaster has helped people realise just how valuable food should be to us.
Brexit will probably (I hope) do the same thing again - I keep hearing on the news that we’re expected to see shortages of food following our departure from the EU, but again, we waste too much food to justify that at the moment, and if we just pay attention to what we’re doing with it, we’re going to be okay.
The phrase “pay attention to what we’re doing” brings me to my second potential reason for this mess we’re in, which is that many people don’t really know how to cook anymore. Not really. I certainly don't. Sure, I can follow a recipe, but I’m not sure I’d call that properly “cooking”. I have very little respect for food, I think because I never learned how it works, and at this stage, I feel like I’ve done well enough so far that I don’t really care to learn.
And I am absolutely not the only one, which means a lot of food gets wasted. This is applicable to both sides of the Rich/Poor divide. Be honest, have you ever bought a food item because it’s fashionable, and weeks later you found it again in the back of the cupboard, laughed to yourself at your optimism, and thrown it away? If you think you’ve never, ever done this, I’m afraid it’s much more likely that doing so mattered so little to you at the time that you’ve forgotten. Because we’ve all done it. Some more than others, sure, but we can definitely see a trend in the average Brit growing less and less knowledgeable about their food over recent decades. Services like Hello Fresh, which literally bring all the food you’ll need to your house and tell you exactly what to do with it, are becoming more and more popular, but by contrast Food Tech was taken off the GCSE curriculum with the graduating class of 2017. All of which makes me think that we don’t value real cooking as a skill anymore.
This is the attitude that seriously needs to change. We need to re-learn how our food works, and how to improvise with it, if we’re going to solve our food waste problem.
The third and final obvious reason lurking behind this crisis is a simple one - food is really hard to store and transport. The regulations we have surrounding food do not help. They’re the strictest in the world in the UK, which is definitely a good thing, but if food must always be kept at a very specific temperature, it’s much more likely to be thrown away if there is any suspicion that it got warmer or colder than it should’ve at some point in the process of moving it around. Which means it’s more likely to get binned than to go to the bother of moving it in the first place.
Which is also bullshit. If I can buy a new smartphone at 7:30 PM and have it delivered to my house by 9:30 the next morning, then someone ought to be able to move our food around. **This genuinely happened, by the way, the same week that the Free School Meals hamper story was headline news, and I had very mixed emotions about it at the time.
I believe that getting better at moving our food around is the key to solving our food waste problem - not just on a national scale, but also between us as individuals. We need to normalise re-distributing food between our communities as a preference to throwing it away. You might not use that jar of Harissa paste in the fridge, but you never know, the guy next door might be really into Jamie Oliver and would love to get his hands on it. We just don’t talk to each other enough to be able to work this out.
The WRAP report does have some encouraging figures on how much surplus food gets redistributed, but the numbers are depressingly small - just 700,000 tonnes of food was successfully redistributed in 2018 compared to the 6.65 million tonnes that we wasted. It’s a start, and it’s getting better, but we’ve got a long way to go.
Ultimately, I think it comes down to the tendency we have to only look out for ourselves when it comes to food. The panic-buying phase the Western world went through in Spring 2020 was a good bad example of this - there was more than enough food to go around, but in their fear, people stockpiled. How much food ended up being thrown away as a result? I dread to think.
2020 is going to turn out to have been a very bad year for food waste on the whole, due to the coronavirus shutting down many elements of the food production and transportation network, but I bet the panic-buying will have far bigger consequences when all is said and done.
My only advice is to simply learn. Learn how food works. Learn about yourself and your habits, and plan your food accordingly. Meal prep. It’s boring as hell, I know, and leaves less room for spontaneity in your daily life, but it’s a lot less wasteful.
If you want to have a more practical impact, have a look and see if there are any Food Clubs open in your community. They’re popping up all over the place as usually volunteer-run weekly events at which people can pick up a good amount of redistributed food for a small amount of money to cover the Club’s costs. If you’ve got time, consider giving one of those clubs a hand.
We won’t be able to fix this overnight, and I do think it’s important to treat the problem at its cause rather than its result - make sure that we’re not wasting food in the first place, rather than try to redistribute it once we’ve figured out it’s surplus - but all solutions have to start somewhere. I hope that just learning about our own food consumption can be our first baby step on the road to a greener, less food-wasteful future.
Written by Jeni Meadows
Jeni's professional life involves customer service and office management at a local charity in Lancaster. When she's not doing that, she's organising the practicalities for a small theatre company, writing a series of increasingly complicated novels, or she's trying to learn sign language. Or she's playing video games to procrastinate doing any of the above.