Down the Drain

Hey there! :)

Well, yes, my last post has only been a short while ago but since I first heard that food is going to be our topic for the time coming, I’ve been thinking about it almost nonstop. Not only that I love, love, love food (who wouldn’t?!). There also is a huge lot more to food than comes to mind when you first think about it.

Quite logically, when they hear the word food most people think of eating it. Makes sense, doesn’t it, because that’s what food is for. Unfortunately, we do not only eat all the delicious, nutritious, mouth-watering stuff we buy – we also throw loads of it away. Every single day.

Oh please, not that kind of talk – did you, by any chance, just think that? Because admittedly, it’s what I think when once a year, statistics are published about how much of the food in our fridge is thrown away because the use-by date has expired (without the product becoming inedible) or because we just can’t remember why we bought something we actually don’t feel like eating anymore. Whenever the numbers come out, there is a public outcry for a day or two before everybody goes back to normal.

But just as there is more to food than eating it, there is more to food waste than us throwing it away. At some point in the past, I randomly started researching food waste and soon discovered that it’s way more complicated than I would have imagined.

Food waste doesn’t start at our homes, in our trash cans, but long before that, on the fields where it is grown. Many farmers grow more food than they intend to sell to be prepared against loss due to bad weather or diseases. What’s more, you might have heard of weird EU regulations stating how bent a cucumber is allowed to be so as to be admitted for sale. There are thousands of those regulations for any kind of food that (at least naturally) occurs in different shapes and sizes, such as fruits, vegetables or meat. Anything that doesn’t fit the norm is of no value and therefore thrown away.

The waste, though, goes on. In U.S. supermarkets, for example, there is (on average) twice as much food available as is actually consumed. Twice as much! So what happens to all the food that is not bought but still edible? Feeding it to livestock would mean hitting two birds with one stone, wouldn’t it? There would be a good use for all the leftovers while at the same time less food would have to be produced for livestock – which is mostly grown in South America and closely linked to deforestation, which again triggers global warming.

I say would, though, because it almost never happens. Why? Because within the EU, for instance, it’s been prohibited since 2001 so as to ensure that diseases don’t spread among livestock due to contamination.

Does that make sense? Not to me. Food that was perfectly fine and edible when it was offered at the supermarket might be contaminated just hours after it has been removed from the shelves? Even if we consider this slight chance, cooking it would see to that problem. But as long as law doesn’t change, surplus food will continue to be disposed of (mostly in landfills where the decay generates tons of climate-damaging methane) rather than be fed to livestock.

And then there is us, the last culprits in a chain of bad deeds. We buy way more food than we’d actually need – not only because we’re hungry and it looks so yummy but also because it’s just so cheap. And even what we decide not to buy takes effect. We’re just used to picking and choosing all the time: that apple’s got a little dent? Better take another one. And that eggplant is a weird shape? Nobody is going to buy it. Our behavior is what makes supermarkets demand for perfect produce only, it’s what makes people in ministries invent strange regulations, it’s what makes farmers grow more food than necessary. It’s what makes food waste a vicious circle.

 

So now what? you might ask. I admit it’s not that we just have to change our behavior and in the blink of an eye we’ll all live happily ever after. It’s an extremely complicated matter. Though the problem is not going to solve itself, either, and somebody has to make the first move. ...why not be that somebody?

If you need a little motivation by someone who is trying to say about the same as I just did (in more sophisticated words, though), you can watch this talk on The global food waste scandal by Tristram Stuart:

Communicating his opinion, in short, is pretty easy:

STOP WASTING FOOD.

I’d be over the moon if you kept this in mind when grocery shopping or clearing out your fridge the next time. ;)

Bye-bye :)