Waste Not, Want Not

Excerpt from the Adelaide Review, 28 August 2009

'How much of the food you buy each week ends up in the rubbish bin? According to Tristram Stuart, the author of a soon-to-be-released book on food waste, Australians throw out about $8billion worth of edible food, or 13 percent of what we buy...

The food we eat is central to our existence and not just for pure survival. It can define our cultural and religious roots, create an atmosphere of romance or celebration and trigger memories of deeply significant moments in our lives...

It is understandable that in nations where food resources are scarce and people struggle to meet their daily nutritional needs, food is a significant preoccupation...

The figures in Tristram Stuart’s book in relation to food waste are depressing. The sheer scale of the waste he reports is hard to comprehend – up to half of the fresh produce in North America and Europe hitting the bin and crops in developing nations left to rot in the fields for lack of means to harvest, process and transport them. Some food never makes it to market in western countries, not because it is not good, but simply because the shape or size or colour does not fit precisely into the guidelines stipulated by the supermarkets that will on-sell it to the public. Solving these problems appears complex but Stuart sums up what’s needed to start the change simply: “Buy what you need and eat what you buy”.

Over the past ten years, he has taken his personal crusade to another level, sourcing most of the food he eats from the bins of supermarkets and other shops in the UK as a protest at their astounding levels of waste. He has also travelled the world, observing and documenting the profligate waste of edible food but also drawing inspiration from the innovation shown by some communities in tackling the problem...

He began working to stem the torrent of food waste as a school boy in the UK, feeding chickens with scraps from the school canteen and local bakery. Asked if he thinks children today are in touch with the sources of their food, he blames relentless urbanisation for the lack of understanding about food sources.

“In the year 2008, Homo sapiens became a majority urban species: most of us live further than ever before from where our food is produced, and this has disconnected us from the land and the value of the food grown on it. Also, as food has become steadily cheaper for the past four decades, until very recently, it has become more of a disposable commodity. We think of wasting food as something we can afford financially, rather than what the planet and the other people that live on it can afford. But I think there is a great counter-trend now: people are beginning to think more about where their food comes from, and being more thrifty with what they buy. Cutting down on food waste can save people a great deal of money as well as benefiting the planet.”...

“Clearly food waste is only one of several major environmental and social problems facing the planet today: but what I show in my book is that it is one of the easiest to overcome. Solving it requires no great sacrifice: it’s not like being asked to give up flying, or driving, or eating meat (though the affluent world does also need to address the problems caused by those activities as well); it’s comparatively easy to stop wasting food.

“Most food companies do not wish their customers to know how much food they waste because people would be appalled to see millions of tonnes of food being dumped unnecessarily. What I have tried to do in my book is lift the lid on the extent of the food waste problem and propose ways in which retailers and others all the way up the supply chain can reduce or eliminate their food waste, which would benefit their businesses, the environment and society. For example, shops can reduce the price of stock nearing expiry so that consumers buy it; some supermarkets have even tried giving surplus away for free as this attracts customers to their stores and eliminates disposal costs; at the very least, they can donate surplus to food redistribution charities who ensure that it is taken to the needy before it passes its expiry date. Some supermarkets already do this to a small extent, but there is a great deal more they can do, and it is up to us - their customers - to demand that this happens...

“There really are cultures that are much less wasteful, which shows that the solutions lie in our hands. The Uighurs of Western China, for example, have a taboo against wasting food, and ensure that every scrap is eaten. One restaurant-owner in Kashgar told me off for leaving a few grains of rice at the bottom of my bowl: wasting food is considered an insult to the cook, the host and the farmer; they know that food is too valuable to waste. It would not be beyond any of us to learn to appreciate food in the same way.”

Stuart also ties his observations of global food waste to much broader environmental concerns such as deforestation and the production of greenhouse gases.

“There are many causes of deforestation in the Amazon which need to be addressed, but the production of meat and dairy products is the single biggest cause. Each year, the European Union (EU) imports 36 million tonnes of soy, primarily from South America, and uses this as animal feed. The demand for land for soy production and animal grazing land is the main cause of deforestation in South America. After the EU banned using food waste as livestock feed, farmers in Europe were forced to buy millions more tonnes of soy from South America, exacerbating the problem of deforestation. Europe also imports millions of tonnes of meat directly from South America, much of it produced on recently deforested land...

“Australia actually performs better than most other affluent countries. The USA has around 200 percent (two times) the amount of food required by the nutritional needs of its population, and a great deal of that excess simply goes to waste; most European countries have between 160 and 190 percent of their nutritional needs; whereas Australia has between 150 and 160 percent. However, that still leaves an enormous amount of slack, and one survey in Australia showed that in households alone people wasted more than 13 percent of the food they buy, worth nearly AU$8 billion. It is possible to enjoy an abundance of food without wasting so much of it.”'