Waste

by Giovanna Dunmall January 26, 2010

In Europe and North America, we throw away around half of our food. Yet even in nations with scores of hungry and malnourished people, there are staggering levels of food waste. India alone wastes $14 billion of agricultural produce every year because it lacks the infrastructure to bring harvests to market without spoiling.

Tristram Stuart, author of the book, Waste: Uncovering The Global Food Waste Scandal, has done studies suggesting that at least 25 per cent of fresh fruit and vegetables produced in Britain is wasted before it even reaches the shops. Piles of imperfect potatoes, spinach, tomatoes and other produce are left in the ground to rot, sent to landfill, or to anaerobic digestion, which generates power from the foul gases that arise.

European rules setting cosmetic standards for fresh produce and the supermarkets' own, even stricter cosmetic standards are culprits. Until this month, the EU banned the sale of oddly-shaped or knobbly versions of 46 different fruits and vegetables. Now, 36 can be sold, allowing curvy cucumbers, knobbly carrots and wizened cherries onto the shelves for the first time in 20 years. However, the rules will stay in place for 10 fruits and vegetables, which account for 75 per cent of fresh produce sales, including bananas, which must have a specifically bendy curve.

One way to reduce food waste almost instantly, and painlessly, Stuart says, would be to divert it to feed pigs and chickens. He believes that the U.K.’s pig and chicken farms are a major and untapped resource and that instead of (or in addition to) spending lots of money on anaerobic digestion plants, we should be “recycling our food waste as swill.” An EU ban on feeding waste food to livestock (instituted after the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001) prevents this currently, but even with the ban in place there are still some foods that can be fed to livestock. Stuart gives an example: One of the major sandwich suppliers to U.K. retail giant Marks & Spencer was throwing away 13,000 slices of bread a day (four slices per loaf — both crusts and the slice inside the crust) until last year when a proactive environmental manager decided to start sending it to anaerobic digestion plants instead. In April this year the bread waste was diverted once more, this time to feed livestock. What makes this story even more compelling is how economically viable the move turned out to be. Instead of costing M&S $98.4 a ton to send it to an anaerobic digestion plant, they are now making $37.7 a ton by selling it to farmers, saving them $163,930 a year. “It’s a no-brainer,” Stuart says loudly.

Another no-brainer, it seems, is the impact of cheap food. The wealthier we have become in the West, the less of our disposable income we spend on food (about 9 percent in the UK versus 85 percent in Pakistan, for instance). Somewhat counterintuitively perhaps, Stuart believes that the solution is not necessarily raising the price of food, but rather educating people that food production causes a third of our global carbon emissions and, quite simply, is too good to waste: “We should be teaching our kids to grow food.”

If a fiscal incentive were introduced, it should be “to make wasting food more expensive, rather than food itself.” And, on a related note, to ensure that the all-powerful supermarket chains also bear the cost and problem of food waste, instead of simply pushing it up the supply chain. Retail giants are expert at making forecast orders of suppliers in advance and then dropping the order by half on the day itself, for example. “The suppliers have clauses in their contracts stating that they can’t sell to anyone else,” Stuart says. Plus, the goods may already be wrapped in the retailers’ packaging. Since the supermarket is paying only for the actual order, instead of the forecast one, it does not lose any money and has no incentive to reduce waste.

With the world already producing more than twice the amount of food we actually consume, Stuart thinks it is madness to deforest more of the globe to feed the billion people going hungry. We should feed them from what we already have.

Resources

Stuart, Tristram. Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal.