Freeganism
Good food for free has been the holy grail of foragers since our ancestors first climbed down from the trees. How ironic, therefore, that it now lies heaped on every street corner, and the primary response it elicits is disgust.
Every week, I heave open a supermarket skip and find therein a more exotic shopping list of items than I could possibly have invented – Belgian chocolates, ripe bananas, almond croissants, stone-ground raisin bread – often so much it would have fed a hundred people. A rummage in the bins of the local sandwich store yields another bewildering array, from granola desserts with honey on top to crayfish salad and tuna-filled bagels.
I can feel the hunter-gatherer in me grunting with satisfaction over another successful forage. But this atavistic reaction is weak alongside the outrage that really motivates my delving into the nation’s rubbish bins. I can perfectly well afford to buy food. “Freeganism” for me is a protest, demonstrating that much of this food should not be in the bin in the first place. There are simple, cost-effective methods of using surplus food for its proper purpose (ie eating it), and there are no solid reasons why these should not be practiced on a nationwide scale.
The food redistribution charity, Fareshare, specialises in collecting high quality food before it passes its sell-by date and passing it on to hundreds of charities that provide meals for the country’s most vulnerable people. Thanks to a £1m lottery grant, Fareshare is rapidly doubling the amount redistributed from 2000 tonnes a year to 4,000 tonnes, with a further 16,000 tonnes that will either be diverted into animal feed, anaerobic digesters, composting, or other modes of waste recycling. Companies as large as Kellogg and Marks & Spencer have climbed on board along with smaller retailers such as Petit Forestier. But this is still the tip of an iceberg. If we redistributed per capita as much food as in the comparatively advanced USA, we would be doling out 50,000 tonnes of free food each year. And with a staggering 4 million people in the UK suffering from food poverty without access to a decent diet, there will be no shortage of willing recipients.
Currently the vast majority of surplus food in the UK is trucked off to landfill sites where it decomposes into toxic effluent and methane, a greenhouse gas 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The food industry has to fork out £50-60 for this ecologically disastrous facility, and if it contains animal by-products, under new legislation they could be looking at £200-£350 per tonne. Fareshare, by comparison, will charge an average of £10 per tonne for their services. Food redistribution is economically sensible, ecologically pressing, and socially responsible; it is high time food corporations woke up to it and governments started funding the organisations that facilitate it.
If eating food reclaimed from bins seems like an extreme action to make this point, then sit back and see how mild it is compared to the extremity of the problem as revealed in the latest set of statistics from Wrap, a waste-reduction organisation connected to the government. First a health warning: they are so appalling they might make you sick.
Britain currently throws away an unimaginable 15m tonnes of food every year. Wrap has tentatively calculated, after painstaking studies, that a whopping 5m tonnes of food are wasted annually by consumers alone: that is, more than a quarter of all food we buy goes into the bin.
The author of a similar project in the USA, Dr Timothy Jones, concluded that about half of the wastage could be avoided. Food production currently uses a large proportion of Britain’s dwindling water supplies; our consumption habits are responsible world-wide for driving soil erosion and deforestation. Furthermore, 20% of all Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the food cycle. If we currently waste nearly half of what we produce, and half of that waste can be avoided, then simply by sorting out this one problem we could slash our emissions by 5%.
It provides a free lunch for some, but discarding this precious resource is an insult to the alleviation of food poverty in our country and contributes senselessly to the destruction of the planet.
Tons of food wasted per year in the UK
Agriculture: 3 to 3.5 million
Manufacturing: 4.1 million
Wholesale: 0.2 million
Retail: 1.4 million
Hotel & catering: 1 million
Consumers: 5 million
Total: 15 million tons.
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