Why waste food?
People gather to eat rescued leftovers at an annual “Feeding the 5000” event in London. The event, hosted by Feedback, a nonprofit that focuses on food waste, is featured in a book by Andrew F. Smith, which examines the causes of avoidable food waste and how to address it. (Photo source: Feedback)
On December 16th, 2009, thousands of people gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square for a feast of “wonky apples” and smoothies made of other supermarket leftovers. It turned out to be the first of many feasts organized by Tristram Stuart, an activist and expert dumpster diver, who has done much to raise awareness about food waste, including starting Feedback, a nonprofit that highlights the global waste crisis and fleshes out solutions.
In Why Waste Food? author Andrew F. Smith highlights why food waste makes no sense, and how easy it is to do something about it.
Feedback is one among many organizations highlighted by Andrew F. Smith in his book, Why Waste Food? . He believes grassroots activism like Stuart’s helped changed the conversation about food waste. He also thinks action to reduce it is way overdue, mostly because it’s not that hard to do. A professor of Food Studies at the New School in New York, Smith has authored and edited more than thirty books on the role of food in society. In this, his latest, he investigates the causes of avoidable food waste and how easy it is for just about anyone to tackle this problem.
For starters, food waste makes no sense. “It is not in the financial self-interest of retailers to throw away edible food,” he writes. “Neither is it in their interest to be publicly criticized for discarding wholesome, nourishing food when people in their local communities are going hungry.”
One third of the food produced globally for consumption goes to waste every year. That’s 1.4 billion tons. And yet 9 million children in the U.S. and 4 million in the U.K. are reported as not having a reliable source of food. Not only that, but those 1.4 billion tons of waste contribute 8 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, threatening our planet as well as our welfare.
So why is this? Smith shines light on the sources of food waste by examining the global food supply chain. He explores farming overproduction, supermarket excess, how frequently consumers over-buy and improperly dispose of excess food, and more.
Each chapter begins with a brief overview of the history of a particular issue. The supermarket waste chapter, for example, describes how the proliferation of supermarkets encouraged bulk purchasing and ready-to-eat food available night and day. Smith notes that produce departments are major waste centers because of the desire for perfect-looking produce. He also writes about the paranoid waste that conflicting expiration dates create. Large stores in the UK end up tossing the equivalent of 190 million meals each year, for example.
Smith also highlights a number of simple and innovative ways to reduce food waste. The book’s guiding principle can be summed up by a quote Smith includes from British chef Douglas McMaster: “Waste is a failure of the imagination.” Solutions range from simply redirecting excess food to people who would otherwise go hungry to upcycling waste by turning it into useful products. In one example, the Manchester brewery Se7en Brothers uses Kellogg’s “too big, too small, overcooked, or otherwise imperfect” cereals to make its ‘Cast Off Pale Ale.’
The European Union has established Food Donation Guidelines that encourage businesses to donate excess food, and businesses in countries including France, Turkey, and Greece have tax incentives to do so as well. Many grocery stores in the United States now have plans in place for reducing waste. Whole Foods and Stop & Shop, for example, send spoiled food to be turned into biogas, a renewable fuel made from organic matter.
In laying out these success stories, Smith encourages us to support more of them—through lobbying, and legislation, and the development of problem-solving practices. He also includes strategies readers can use for themselves. Consumers can order custom boxes of bruised or misshapen produce, for instance. Knowing that 25 percent of paper recyclables in the U.S. alone are covered in food waste and therefore unrecyclable may inspire more of us to instead bring refillable containers to zero-waste stores that offer package-free bulk goods.
At times, the book can be a bit redundant with the same facts and examples mentioned in multiple sections. It’s organized into particular solutions, like “smart refrigerators and community refrigerators,” but some examples are not simple enough to fit into one category, blurring the distinctions between sections. He sometimes includes brief one-sentence summaries of different solutions, which left me curious for more information when an interesting case is introduced and then swept away to make room for the next one. Indeed, the “practical guide,” as Danielle Nierenberg of Food Tank, calls the book in the back-cover blurb, may be more of a refer-to-as-needed than a cover-to-cover read.
But Smith did his research. The most inspiring part of the book are the countless examples of community efforts to reduce food waste. Seeing how so many small groups across the globe have cropped up to tackle this problem makes it easier to envision not only how to get involved yourself but why it’s worth your time.
Why Waste Food? provides us with two of the most important tools we need: information and hope. Knowing the history of how the food waste crisis arose draws our attention to systemic factors and the fact that they result from particular decisions and choices. By taking those factors into consideration, we can more easily imagine a reality where different choices can be made.
Samantha Meagher is a Stone Pier Press News Fellow based in Oxford, England.
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