Let's talk about... food waste
How can we be wasting so much food when 2 million people in the UK use food banks?
According to data from WRAP (the Waste and Resource Strategy group in England), we waste 9.5 million tonnes of food every year in the UK, 70% of which is directly from our homes. Every day we apparently throw away 20 million slices of bread, 5.2 million glasses of milk, 0.9 million bananas and 4.4 million potatoes. To put this into context, according to Friends of the Earth, that’s equivalent to chucking away £470 a year/household.
The remaining waste comes from manufacturers (19%), hospitality and food services including hotels, restaurants and catering (12%), with the remaining 2% produced by the retail industry. One thing that’s important to note though is that these figures do not include food lost on farms, which could add on another 3.3 million tonnes a year.
It’s a sorry picture when climate change threatens food security (our ability to grow nutritious food ie fruit and vegetables not the production of packaged junk, see UPF post below) and according to published data, 3% of people in the UK used a food bank in 2022/23. And globally, one third of all food produced in either lost or wasted.
Let's learn about... Ultra Processed food
Oh my this post that’s taken me from many an article and research paper, to debates at the British Library! Like many things in nutrition, there are a lot of opinions vying for attention, not least of which some of the big food companies sponsor convincing ‘research’ to ‘prove’ that its food is not that bad.
At an industry level, the waste occurs for a multitude of reasons (overproduction, damaged packaging to order errors and confusion over Best Before dates), some is rendered inedible, but it’s estimated that 4.7. million tonnes of food could have been eaten. That’s enough food to make 7 billion meals a year. This is a mammoth waste of resources, and not just at the meals level, but also at the land, water and energy level that went into making the food in the first place. Especially significant when we consider that the food system as a whole (according to The Felix Project, London’s largest food redistribution charity) generates about 25% of our carbon emissions (through growing - fertiliser to livestock, transporting and preparing food), and uses 70% of global freshwater reserves.
While we wait for legislative change to force company change (The Courtauld Commitment is the UK’s voluntary agreement that aims for a collaborative farm to fork reduction in food waste of 50% per person by 2030), how can we help ourselves?
What to do…
Get fridge fit. The ideal temperature should be 0-5 degrees Centigrade. Things will go off quicker if it’s warmer. And some foods last longer out of the fridge, namely potatoes, bananas (keep in a cupboard for darkness too), bread and onions.