The huge food wastage that occurs in the westernised nations of the world is coming to the notice of more and more people, and particularly conservation-minded people; magazines, advertisements and appeals are claiming that our throwaway society is wasting so much food it is scandalous.
According to Tristram Stuart, author and contributor to the UK-based charity Food Ethics Council’s (FEC) magazine, ‘There are nearly a billion malnourished people in the world, but all of them could be lifted out of hunger with less than a quarter of the food wasted in Europe and North America. In a globalised food system, where we are all buying food in the same international market place, that means we're taking food out of the mouths of the poor.’
In addition to feeding the poor and malnourished, he also claims that the production of wasted food also squanders resources, and said that the irrigation water used by farmers to grow wasted food would be equivalent to the domestic water needs of nine billion people.
This wastage has other side and flow-on effects for the entire world including
· a financial loss to consumers
· a general apathy towards any kind of thrift or stewardship in the general western community
· increased burden on landfill, which consequently contributes to methane production, which is in turn harmful to another vital commodity – the ozone layer
· the obesity epidemic, which has swept the world with at least 400 million adults being recorded as obese by the World Health Organisation in 2005.
There are increasing numbers of appeals to take stock of what you buy, eat and throw away, and there are many creative ideas being promoted to help people reduce food wastage, from planning weekly shopping lists, to reducing portion size of meals, to packing ‘zero waste lunch boxes, to reusing leftovers. Having said that, the executive director of the FEC says that simply throwing out less food is not the answer, but instead everyone should be looking for ways to ‘define prosperity that get away from runaway consumption’.
So this naturally begs the question ‘how much is enough’? I frequently scan my weekly grocery bill to work out what we could have done without. This is a good exercise that helps to rationalise how much wastage we have and how much I spend. And I’m lucky – I can feed leftovers or (mostly) fruit and vegetable waste to our hungry chickens and the dog. So technically we have little wastage. And then there’s the compost bin for the items that are beyond even the avian or canine diets, which in turn feeds our small vegetable plot.
But what is the minimum standard of nutrition we require to stay healthy? In this era of ‘foodies’ and the café culture it’s hard not to be swayed by the magnificent menus we come across and all the tempting recipes that are presented in such a mouth-watering way they’re hard to resist. I keep my menu ever changing at home because we have all developed the ‘fussy-foodie’ mentality. ‘The broccoli is underdone…the pasta sauce is too salty…there’s not enough avocado in this salad’ to name a few of the whines we have at our dinner table. It’s embarrassing really when I think of how many malnourished people there are in the world.
Why can’t we just eat what’s put in front of us these days as it was in my parent’s generation, and even in my own childhood? Granted, it was not always a nutritious diet in the last few decades for various reasons; war, depression, mass farming techniques. But then, when my father used to remind us that there are ‘starving children in Africa’, what did it achieve as we tucked into and ate every morsel on our overfilled plates?
Other than making us thankful that we weren’t those starving children in Africa, not a lot. But at least he passed on to us awareness that there were people who didn’t have what we had and this has become an integral part of my thought processes in an increasing way over the years.
I am examining the aspects of food miles, food wastage, farming and production techniques, and organic and biodynamic foods, home production among other topics. I am constantly agonising over whether we should or shouldn’t eat organic bananas, or not because the gases used to ripen commercial crops are toxic to humans, but the cost is double if you buy organically grown bananas…
It’s easy to sit back and whine, ‘but how can I help?’ and flap my hands weakly, but as in so many changes for the better, small steps an be taken to make small changes. And being aware that there is a problem is a personal first step towards finding solutions.
Sources:
1. ‘Elimination of food waste could lift 1bn out of hunger, say campaigners’, Adam Vaughan http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/08/food-waste
