Today in the U.K., 7 million slices of bread, 2.8 million tomatoes, and 660,000 eggs will be thrown in the garbage. Most will be perfectly good and entirely edible.
The same amount will be thrown out tomorrow and the next day as it was yesterday and the day before. In fact, these items make up just a small portion of the food that is wasted every single day in the U.K.
Put together, more than US$16 billion a year is literally being thrown in the trash.
Such is the cruel irony of our age. As governments in the developed world face massive deficits and people in poor countries struggle to feed themselves, we are discarding expensive food on a mammoth scale.
Few of us give a second thought to the leftovers on our plates, the apple that just doesn’t look right, or the bread crusts we don’t like. But the economic, environmental, and ethical implications of wasting them resonate across the globe.
This reality hit home in the U.K. last year when a study revealed just how much food residents were throwing out. It found that roughly one-third of the food produced there—or 6.7 tons—found its way to the trash. More than 60 percent of it could have been eaten, and 15 percent was still in its original packaging.
The study also found that this wasted food was pumping so much greenhouse gas into the air that stopping it would be like taking one in five cars off the road.
To say that these numbers were a wake-up call would be putting it lightly. The report caused such a stir that even Prime Minister Gordon Brown riled against “unnecessary” purchases at the grocery store. Suddenly, food conservation became en vogue.
Of course, the U.K. is not the only offender, nor is it the worst. Depending on whom you believe, the United States throws out between 30 and 50 percent of its food, totaling some $100 billion a year.
Compare that to the developing world, where food scarcity is so severe that a spike in prices last year caused riots in 30 countries. More than 1 billion people suffer from malnutrition, and a child dies of hunger every six seconds.
Yet according to the World Food Program, America’s food waste alone is enough to feed every hungry person in Africa. Talk about being born in the wrong place.
So why the disparity? How can it be that so few waste so much, while the rest starve? On a practical level, many people have a poor understanding of how to store their food. Meat, fruit, and vegetables go bad far quicker than they have to simply because we don’t store them properly.
But the bigger culprit is the culture of abundance so pervasive in many Western countries. We simply produce too much, far more than we need, and feel entitled to doing just that. Somehow, overproduction and overconsumption have become symbols of a free and democratic society.
And when we have too much, we simply throw it out. It doesn’t seem to matter, since there’s always more at the grocery store. Rows and rows of cheap packaged goods means we never have to worry about where our next meal will come from.
Food, after all, is just another commodity. It’s long lost its true value. The days where your grandmother told you not to waste food because you’re lucky to have it are long gone.
But not all the news is bad. In pockets around the world, movements toward smarter shopping are gaining traction as people commit themselves to a responsible lifestyle.
More and more consumers are logging on to Web sites like Wastedfood.com to find tips on food preservation—everything from advice on storing what you buy to recipes for your leftovers.
And for the food we do throw out, Sweden is leading the charge to turn organic waste into fuel. The country already has 7,000 cars and 800 buses that run on biogas. In 2005, it even unveiled the world’s first biogas commuter train.
There’s still a lot of work to do, but these are important first steps. In the end, the way we view what we eat will only change once we realize just what it means to throw food away and what we are really losing when we do.
There’s certainly nothing wasteful about that.
Chris Mallinos is a Toronto-based journalist whose work has appeared on six continents and in seven languages. You can reach him at www.chrismallinos.com
