Food waste is a form of passive violence. Let me explain. Recently in Dundee, we were lucky enough to have a visit from Dr Arun Gandhi, fifth grandson of the famous Mahatma Gandhi. He was giving a talk entitled ‘The Gift of Anger’ and reciting many of the pieces of wisdom handed down to him by his famous grandfather. One of these related to the unnecessary waste caused by the throwing way of a pencil, deemed to be too short for further useful writing by the then young Arun, in the belief his grandfather would give him another. Not so. The young lad was told to find the discarded pencil, and told that such a waste of resources was an act of passive violence because it led to the denying of resources to other people who needed them. And so I believe you could view food waste in the same way.
“…wealthy countries of the world throw away 222 million tonnes of food a year, most of which is perfectly edible.”
Food loss and waste
According to the Food & Agricultural Organisation, roughly a third of the edible parts of all the food produced globally for human consumption gets lost or wasted, amounting to 1.3 billion tonnes. In south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, up to three quarters of this is lost at the stages of production and storage. Clearly there is a great need for better agricultural practices and infrastructure to reduce this loss, which is also an enormous waste of all the resources – land, water, energy, fertilisers – used in its production, not to mention the effect on climate change.
But it’s at the other end of the food supply chain, what I would call the demand end, where we as consumers have the biggest impact. In a world where 795 million people are going to bed hungry every night and millions more are malnourished in terms of lacking a healthy diet, it is a scandal that the wealthy countries of the world throw away 222 million tonnes of food a year, most of which is perfectly edible. This is the true cost of our lifestyles which give us so much choice in terms of fruit and vegetables available all year round, and of our desire for exotic and fashionable ‘superfoods’ (think avocados and all things coconut derived).
“795 million people are going to bed hungry every night.”
Lifestyle choices
The supermarkets have a responsibility too, with their ‘three for two’ offers (paid for by the producers) and their obsession with appearance – around 30% of vegetables meant for supermarkets are wasted because they are not the right shape or colour. That and the growing demand globally for a western-style meat based diet, and the ubiquitous presence of palm oil in processed foods leads to swathes of forest and wetlands being cleared and land in the global south being diverted away from growing staple foods for local people.
In the global food system, dominated by a few very large multinational corporations which control so much of the production, processing and selling of the world’s food, we as consumers can sometimes feel powerless. But there is always something we can do to make a difference, whether it’s campaigning for fair prices and food sovereignty locally and globally, to simply buying only the amount of food we need. Learning and teaching about food waste provides an ideal interdisciplinary context for work in science, maths, language and social studies, but ultimately, as Gandhi suggests, it is a moral issue.
