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Food waste in the future

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Photo: Chris King

It’s doubtful people will be going to the polls with food waste on their minds this election.  The future of the NHS, Brexit and climate change have dominated the election campaigns, and for good reason. If you’re reading this, you’re probably no stranger to the climate implications of food waste. Hubbub’s recently published research showed this issue is very important to people and that they believe retailers play a significant role in shaping our habits. In fact, what it shows is that people are looking to individuals, communities and the market to resolve the issue and that’s what we’ve been told to do.

This is Rubbish (TiR) has been looking at the issue in the wider context of global food and agriculture and what will happen in this country after the election. Nearly a billion people living in food poverty globally could be fed on less than a quarter of the food being wasted in the UK, US and Europe while the Government’s Environmental Audit Committee found that between 1.97 and 3 million people in the UK are undernourished and in London alone 9 million meals a day are needed to alleviate hunger according to City Harvest. This is happening in a country where, according to the latest estimates by WRAP, around 10 million tonnes of food and drink is wasted after the farm every year. Out of this, approximately 70% is avoidable wastage which could have been used to feed the hungry and malnutritioned. How are we getting it so wrong? Not only are redistribution initiatives unable to meet the demands of the problem but this strategy does not alleviate the environmental harm caused by a broken food system.

After many years of campaigning, in 2014 TiR set out to deliver education programmes that informed young people about the causes and effects of food waste. That is, when they throw food away, they are wasting everything that went into its production. Even though the proportion of food wasted at the consumption stage is 22% of the total, the carbon footprint at this stage is almost 37% of the total carbon footprint of the food chain. The next step is to examine how the system is allowing this to happen when the costs are so high. The very fact that we can and have been wasting up to a third of all food that is produced is because we have a food system predicated on market forces with little or no accountability. In reality this means that we can exploit the land and resources of poorer countries and transfer waste onto them through unfair trading practises. We can do this in a country where the retail sector has the ability to set prices and pick and choose from global food markets regardless of the human and environmental cost.

Prominent figures from the world of finance are finally saying we need to “rethink capitalism and its obsession with constant economic growth” and that our current system “borrows from the future while destroying the environment” as reported last month in the FT.

Transition is inevitable, justice is not

We know we need to address climate change. Channel 4’s recent climate debate shows how seriously most of the leadership candidates are taking this. However, there is a danger of focusing the narrative around single issues rather than looking at the social and economic drivers of the climate crisis.

We cannot put in place goals for our own country without looking at what they mean for other countries. If we do this, we will surely never be able to address climate change in time. We need to look at the problems of the food system, including waste, as rooted in global inequality perpetuated by our economics. We are already seeing that climate change is forcing migration due to food and water shortages and the political instability that follows. Continuing down a road of extractive and consumptive behaviour will exacerbate this.

Across the world we are seeing calls for a Just Transition. The Green New Deal movement, The TUC, Friends of the Earth (FoE) to name a few, have identified that carbon neutrality cannot be achieved using old thinking and exploitation of the local or international labour force. In this country, nobody wants to see lives affected as they were by the shutting of the coal mines in the 1980’s.

As FoE rightly puts it “The real choice is not jobs or climate. It’s both or neither. Transition is inevitable, justice is not.” When we signed the Paris Accord we agreed to  ‘Take into account the imperatives of a just transition of the workforce and the creation of decent work and quality jobs in accordance with nationally defined development priorities.” TiR is looking to the next government to honour this.

TiR agrees with the findings of the 2018 EAT-Lancet report: food will be the defining issue of this century we are calling for the next Government to help design waste out of the supply chain and fix a broken system. Our next campaign will seek to engage stakeholders in changing the narrative to reframe food waste as a problem rooted in inequality and power imbalances.

To keep up to date with the campaign sign up for our newsletter here or go to our donation page here.

Getting to the root of the problem: food waste, food poverty & redistribution

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Banner image: Mack Male 

Mickey Reedy, Co – Director at This is Rubbish

This week The Evening Standard announced, for the second time, that it had found the solution to food waste. The solution is redistribution by way of The Felix Project. Hilary Croft, Felix Project Chief Executive, claimed “It’s the fact that food poverty is so avoidable in this country that is maddening. [This can be] solved by putting in place simple measures of redistribution.”

Hilary is correct that the crisis of food poverty is avoidable. But the truly maddening part is that not enough is being done to alleviate the deep causes of poverty, such as cuts to vital benefits and paucity of secure, adequately paid jobs. 60% of people in poverty in Britain are in working families, according to a recent study by Cardiff University. I find it maddening that 70,000 London children are going to school hungry while an estimated one in five shopping baskets worth of food is thrown away. Above all I find it maddening that the solution is to continue with business as usual finding a way to justify systemic waste as a solution to poverty rather than examining the root causes of both. The assertion that food redistribution is “a simple solution” is misleading.

According to The Institute for Fiscal Studies Nearly 4m children are currently growing up in poverty in the UK after their families’ housing costs are taken into account. The IFS predicts we could see over a million more children growing up in poverty by 2022. The journalist Margaret Greenwood recently wrote that the last Labour government made tackling child poverty a key priority, from the creation of Sure Start centres to increases in social security and employment support targeted at lone parent families.

It paid off – between 1997 and 2010 child poverty fell by 1.1m and the employment rate for single parents increased from 44 per cent to 57 per cent.

Since 2010, progress in reducing child poverty first stalled and then after 2015 has gone into reverse. The government not only abandoned the targets set by the last Labour government to cut child poverty, but abolished the Child Poverty Unit set up to coordinate policy across government.

Much could be and has been said about benefit cuts, policy and government spending. According to the IFS absolute child poverty is projected to increase from 15.1% in 2015–16 to 18.3% in 2020–21. This increase is driven entirely by a sharp rise in poverty among families with three or more children, which is itself the result of planned tax and benefit reforms. To quote the food policy expert, Tim Lang from the centre for Food Policy at City University, “choose your parents well.” Or in this case, your siblings.

We cannot fix poverty and climate change on a meal by meal basis. TiR is calling for systemic change supported by environmental and socially just policies because carrying on business as usual will leave a devastating legacy for tomorrow’s children

As a chef, an educator and a human being, I find child hunger, malnourishment and their well-documented education and social outcomes heart breaking. I’ve heard of teachers buying breakfast cereal for their primary students, children unable to complete football tournaments due to holiday hunger and schools unable to access funding for breakfast clubs because they cannot prove the level of need. If parents are reluctant to apply for free school meals, it begs the question whether they will queue up to receive hand outs from The Felix Project.

This is Rubbish has benefitted from the Dispossessed Fund, launched by the Evening Standard campaign against food waste and managed by Food for London. We have been working with young people from refugee, migrant and low income backgrounds to give them cooking skills and redistribute fresh produce from the retail sector. Some of the kids have been ambivalent, some grateful but one thing is clear: they don’t want to be told what to eat and by extension what members of their families should be cooking, so some of the food has been rejected on those grounds. The aim of the programmes is to introduce new ingredients as well as skills to the young people and parents are usually delighted when they see their chicken and chips loving offspring eating fruit and vegetables but it has highlighted the paternalism of food redistribution. However you dress it up, people have less choice if they are being given food rejected by supermarket shoppers.

For many people, including beneficiaries of the Edible Enterprise programme, it is all very well to give them nourishing food but they lack adequate kitchen facilities to prepare it or, as Martin Caraher identified during research as a Professor of food and health policy at City University, families often lack the funds to pay for gas and electric to prepare food.

Image: Sierra Soleimani

Nobody will argue against filling the bellies of hungry children with nourishing food but there is nothing ‘simple’ about the causes and effects of food waste. A system predicated on surplus where huge supermarkets have densely stocked shelves for 24 hours a day – so those who can, will be able to purchase almost any food from any part of the planet on a whim – is unsustainable. Indeed, it flies in the face of basic social justice while many people are struggling to meet their nutritional needs and that of their children. However, rejoicing in the certainty they can rely on retail surplus presented as charity is mad as much as it is maddening. The environmentally catastrophic overproduction involved in sustaining this broken food system is maddening too. And above all calling the answer simple is dangerous.

Our motto at This is Rubbish is: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”. This is why we are pleased that Emma Lewell-Buck MP’s Ten Minute Rule Bill on measuring the scale of food insecurity has passed the first reading in Parliament this week. The Felix Project can put its public reach and influence to back this bill as it enters its second reading – due to take place in February 2018 – and progress further toward becoming an Act of Parliament. Moreover, the Felix Project and the Evening Standard should do more to highlight the efforts of poverty action campaigns such as End Hunger UK working to address the root causes of poverty, such as unsustainably low wages and deep benefit cuts.

We cannot fix poverty and climate change on a meal by meal basis. TiR is calling for systemic change supported by environmental and socially just policies because carrying on business as usual will leave a devastating legacy for tomorrow’s children.