There is a great piece in this weekend’s Observer newspaper about growing demand for food charity handouts in the UK. FareShare, the charity that channels the redistribution of surplus to the requirements of food supermarkets and manufacturers, reports a rise in recipients from 29,000 to 35,500 this year. It now channels otherwise unwanted food through 700 public-facing charities that have signed up to its services – 100 more than last year.
Read all about it here.
Journalist Jay Rayner and his interviewees rightly cite the causes as economic and political. Rising unemployment and a time lag before benefits start to arrive, as well as changes to the benefit system and housing rules, have led to a shift in the demographic of those seeking food hand-outs from single men to families and those “who were, for want of a better term, normal working people. Those who have lost jobs or who were running their own businesses and still need to feed their families.”
Now, there are three principal actors in this story, and it seems to me they are all behaving strangely.
First, you have a food industry that produces more food than paying customers will buy so it can be 200% sure it can meet demand. Add to that the food that’s slipped past its sell-by date but is still good to eat and food in packages that have been mis-printed or beaten about in transit, and that’s one heck of a lot of landfill instead belly-fill.
The cost of producing too much food and allowing for wastage along the supply chain is lower than the costs risked through lost sales and brand damage of not having enough to meet a sudden demand surge. Go figure !
Next, you have government that is bending the welfare state out of all recognition and slashing public spending – and with it, thousands of jobs. What is more, the central ideologies of Localism and Big Society are shifting the sands of responsibility away from the state and towards cash strapped local authorities, charities, and community volunteer groups.
Finally, you have a charity that is playing see-saw between mitigating the effects of both those first two ‘actors’.
FareShare chief executive Lindsay Boswell is quoted as saying : “We started out purely interested in liberating waste… We are an environmental charity that gets bloody angry about food being wasted.”
Now, though, this role of holding the food industry to account and sending unwanted wares to where they are needed most has morphed into one where preventing as many people as possible from going hungry to bed is the major daily grind.
Hands up who thinks we live in a mad, mad world ?
Related posts:
Hand up.
Have you read Tristram Stuart’s Waste? It’s good. http://www.tristramstuart.co.uk/
I will add another principal actor in the story who I think is also behaving strangely: all the Citizen Joes out there.
I think the amount of waste all up and down the food chain is appalling, and I think that the most blame should be put on those with the most power to influence (up and down the chain) and the most resources to shoulder any initial investments needed: retailers. (I think, anyway; if you have any other candidates for big chunks of blame assignment, I’m happy to dole it out with abandon.) But I ‘get’ that retailers are greedy and so on, and while I’d like them to change, I don’t necessarily expect them to.
What stymies me is the absurd amount of waste that happens in every person’s home. These are people buying too much food, not using it ‘well’, and then throwing out a third to a half of it? (Ok, some of that figure likely counts things such as orange peels, which really shouldn’t be counted, in my opinion, ‘but still’). That’s a lot of waste happening in the home. And if people are struggling to buy enough food … and then wasting at the same time … hmmm … I’d say that’s strange behavior.
Now, I haven’t seen any data on, say, the amount of food wasted by people who receive food aid (whether in kind or in subsidy) compared to people who don’t. I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the figure were more or less consistent across groups. Either way: too much waste in the home, and too many Citizen Joes behaving strangely.
Agreed that Citizen Joe can do a lot more, both at home and by talking to supermarket managers to express concern about food waste. Believe it or not, this kind of dialogue can have an impact and at the very least simply by asking questions or registering a concern puts the issue on the map for retailers.
Improving food usage at home really comes down to food skills. It seems that our process of re-skilling is focusing on the more elite sort of food knowledge when we should be focusing more on using the whole food.
Many people know about roasting pumpkin seeds (though few probably do), but did you know that you can boil the skins of a pineapple after you’ve cut it to make a decent juice? And you can even plant the top green part for a spiky plant (make sure to twist it off not cut it off).
Lani, actually, in mentioning RE-skilling, you’ve raised another really important point that maybe we don’t talk about enough: DE-skilling. (To understand the extent of DE-skilling in the UK, you’ve only got to go as far as the recipe section in any newspaper / magazine / etc. Almost all take the form ‘Add one can of tomatoes, one can of beans, etc…’) .
DE-SKILLING is probably one of the big factors affecting all kinds of aspects of the waste story: people can’t cook, so they are forced to buy ready meals, so the supermarkets stock them, and they go to waste due to poor stock management; people don’t know how to use ‘all the goodness’ in a food, so (as you’ve pointed out), pumpkin skins and souring milk go to waste; people don’t know how to compost, so they don’t; and on an on ….