What a waste

Britain throws away £10bn of food every year

It’s the talking point of the morning, Dizzy Thinks picked it up at an early hour and Victoria Derbyshire is debating it on Radio 5 Live right now, after this article appeared in today’s Independent.

Each day, according to the government-backed report, Britons throw away 4.4 million apples, 1.6 million bananas, 1.3 million yoghurt pots, 660,000 eggs, 550,000 chickens, 300,000 packs of crisps and 440,000 ready meals. And for the first time government researchers have established that most of the food waste is made up of completely untouched food products – whole chickens and chocolate gateaux that lie uneaten in cupboards and fridges before being discarded.

The roll call of daily waste costs an average home more than £420 a year but for a family with children the annual cost rises to £610.

The Environment minister, Joan Ruddock, said:

“These findings are staggering in their own right, but at a time when global food shortages are in the headlines this kind of wastefulness becomes even more shocking. This is costing consumers three times over. Not only do they pay hard-earned money for food they don’t eat, there is also the cost of dealing with the waste this creates. And there are climate- change costs to all of us of growing, processing, packaging, transporting and refrigerating food that only ends up in the bin. Preventing waste in the first place has to remain a top priority.”

Dizzy sees a law of unintended consequences as the nanny state tells us to get rid of food that is near, on, or past it’s use by date, and wonders if the Independent would scream the same big headlines if it were found out that we were consuming food that carried the slightest risk that it was “going off”. Derbyshire’s programme is carrying the full gamut of opinions from those calling us all greedy, even though we are going through a period of world food shortages and price rises, and those who call themselves “freegans” existing on a diet of food thrown out by others (yes there are such people in Britain who eat quite healthily by this method.) The anti consumerist/corporatist lobby isw also in there too blaming the supermarkets – it’s all their fault that we make the decisions that we do about food.

One of the best quotes that I heard this morning came from a “freegan” on the radio;

“There’s more than enough to cater for our needs, but not enough to cater for our greed”.

And this perhaps is the point that Dizzy misses, we make poor choices and our decisions are not rational when it comes to food shopping, sure supermarkets have tried and tested methods of promoting products (buy one get one free, buy a pack of six at a discounted rate etc.) but too many people have a lifestyle that dictates one big weekly shop instead of perhaps shopping a little more often and only buying what we essentially need. We are all prone to falling for the impulse purchase as we wander around the supermarkets filling our trolley to capacity, and they do make a point of putting the big promotional deals on gondola ends where we are more likely to see them. On those special occasions during the year such as Christmas and Easter we go out and behave as though we imagine the shops will be closed for a week, when in most cases the supermarkets will be closed for no more than a day or too whils your local shops will probably remain open. Without doubt I have seen families shopping in Asda and Tesco in South Shields filling three or four trollies at these times of year knowing full well that the contents of one of those trollies will be wasted as the food “goes off” before we have a chance to eat it.

It all seems rather mad!

I cannot agree with those who blame the supermarkets for this behaviour, it’s our choice yet we don’t tend to make the right choice, and I accept Dizzy’s point that we even make the wrong choices once we get the food home and into the fridge. Supermarkets have got much better at managing their own waste, food which is nearing it’s sell by date is often reduced to move it off the shelf quicker, there is no advantage to them in filling their skips with waste food (they pay a high price for having their waste collected so they like to cut the costs here too.) Smaller outlets and local shops also have mechanisms in place to reduce the amount of waste they produce, I like to recall the name used by one of my former work colleagues who describes a shop in Frederick Street, South Shields as “second hand Greggs”, it may sound disrespectful but the company is using this one outlet to sell off it’s products at discounted rates simply because they are now 24 hours old, but at least they are not throwing it all away. Others have arrangements to have food waste collected and reprocessed and recycled as animal feeds, again to prevent waste collection charges and as a positive measure to reduce landfill.

So business and retailers are doing their bit, it is the consumer who is failing to recognise the consequences of their own poor choices and decisions that results in such a mountain of waste, yet it need not be so. My mother made a virtue of using left overs to make a second nutritional meal for the family, my father even recycled chicken bones to make soups, and by consuming little and more often we are likely to buy only the things we really need rather than over indulging our fantasies about what we can actually eat in a week.

It may not help the “freegans” if we waste less, it may not help Tesco if we buy less, but hey it might help the family budget as food prices rise and shortages become more apparent. Market, price, supply, and demand, more often than not help to even things out, that’s the beauty of Adam Smith’s invisible hand.

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