In December This Is Rubbish Will be contributing to Tristram Stuart’s Feeding The Five Thousand event in Trafalgar Square. We will be handing out free smoothies made entirely from fruit that hasn’t passed the exacting aesthetic standards of a major wholesale market.

We are expecting a good number of people * so most of the smoothies will be prepared before hand. But we will also be making smoothies during the event and all the fruit will be stored in our very own mockup skip. Making the point that this good food shouldn’t be in a skip in the first place, eating thrown out food isn’t an ideal, the ideal is a system where good food isn’t thrown out.

*5000 would be a good number of people.

If you do a quick Google search for UK food waste you will quickly find out that UK households waste 8.3 Million tonnes of food per year, most of which is perfectly edible.

This is a lot of food, and a great deal of expense. Roughly £480 a year for an average household. For this reason we are glad that campaigns like Love Food : Hate Waste exist, offering practical tips on how all of us can cut our food waste and improve our budgeting.

However, there is a question that isn’t so easily answered. How much food is wasted before it gets to the supermarket shelves or the restaurant table?  Well, if you are persistent in checking all the pages that Google brings to your attention you may find the website of Inetec.  And they make an interesting claim.  Apparently the UK wastes around 17 Million tonnes of food a year, a third of which is produced by large scale food processes.  The breakdown of food waste is therefore roughly 8 million tonnes by households, 6 million tonnes during food manufacture and 3 million tonnes by supermarkets and restaurants.

This Is Rubbish has been in contact with Charlotte Henderson at WRAP and established that they are doing work on food waste from field to supermarket shelf:

“We are carrying out research at the moment to understand how much and where product is lost in the retail supply chain. This includes waste at manufacturing sites, in distribution and back of store, covering the grocery supply chain.” Read on >