Book review: Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal
IT MIGHT HAVE SEEMED THE perfect initiative for a dour Prime Minister: last July Gordon Brown supported a call by the Government's Waste and Resources Action Programme to reduce the amount of food we throw away. It's estimated Britons throw out at least four million tonnes of food every year: Mr Brown sternly warned householders to plan meals better and store food better.
The fact that this became an own-goal, with the news that Mr Brown and other G8 leaders were sitting down to a 19-course banquet in Japan, should not obscure the good sense of the Prime Minister's call. But the tone of his comments and the irritable reaction to them highlight a bigger problem with such green campaigns: it is easy to sound preachy. And it is harder to come up with firm solutions to problems that are caused by the knitting together of business drive for profit and consumer greed.
Advertisement
Hide AdThat is the weakness of Tristram Stuart's exhaustive expos of food waste. Certainly the figures involved are enormous, even if it's often hard to be sure of their exact size. In Britain we create a total of up to 20 million tonnes of food waste each year; in the US, 50 per cent of all food is wasted somewhere along the food chain.
There is little doubt this is partly the fault of consumers over-buying. We are also confused by sell-by dates: most are superfluous, since it's fairly obvious when something is off, especially fruit and vegetables. Yet consumer waste is dwarfed by what's binned further up the supply chain – by supermarkets rejecting vegetables for minor irregularities in size or shape, or by the fishing industry throwing vast amounts of "by-catch" – the species they don't want – overboard.
Stuart stresses the environmental impact, from the resources used to produce wasted food (it takes on average at least 15,000 litres of water and 10kg of feed to produce one kilo of beef) to the methane it emits if dumped uneaten into landfill. He estimates that if food waste were halved globally, it would cut emissions by 5 per cent.
Wasteful? Certainly. Immoral? Stuart thinks so – and it's hard to disagree. The problem comes when you try to figure out what to do about it. He has plenty of practical suggestions which are achievable – for example, for supermarkets to work harder at channelling surplus food to the homeless.
Yet I don't think most people's behaviour will be so easily changed. For instance, many sandwich shops and the like deliberately over-order, to make sure that they have a good supply of their whole range on display. They end up throwing lots away. The sensible thing might seem to order less. But the shops' reading of consumer behaviour is accurate: if a customer doesn't make it out for lunch until 2:30pm, and finds the pretty much empty but for odds and sods, he'll probably go somewhere else next time.
We have become accustomed to plenty: it is hard to see how we will change our expectations until forced to by actual scarcity. And even if we eat all we buy, huge waste is built into a system that gives us a level of choice and quality beyond the dreams of royalty for most of history. The current rash of books offering homespun advice on wasting not and making do will not change that. Nor will the market redirect food to the hungry if we consume less. I compost; I feel bad. But I still expect fresh tuna and flawless tomatoes.