Every year, Americans waste between 30-40% of their food. The conservative estimate equates to $48.3 billion. Britons aren’t any better. In 2007, UK consumers threw away 6.7 million tonnes of food: one third of the total purchased, equivalent to £10.2 billion. That’s almost as much as the GDP of the Republic of Congo.
These figures come from an article in the latest Fabian Society Policy Report, Revaluing Food. The report is based largely on the results of a quantitative survey conducted by the Fabian Society into food habits and waste, with further commentary by academics, policy-makers and NGO workers. It makes for some uncomfortable reading about a neglected problem.
60% of people believe that food waste is a problem in the UK, which must be solved. Most people, however, believe that the solutions should not necessarily require much behavioural change, but more effort or responsibility on the part of companies or the government. And yet, the main reason people gave for throwing away food was that it went off too quickly: nearly 35% of people said this was one of the main barriers to reducing food waste (22% however, said there are no such barriers). When told of the climate change implications of household food waste – the damage being equal to what is created by 20% of cars on the road – the proportion of respondents who see it as a problem rises to nearly 70%. Britons do seem to care about the environment, but struggle to stop the proverbial low-hanging fruit from going to waste.
Food scarcity is no longer a pressing issue of social justice in the developed world, which probably explains the infrequent mention of its wastage and unsustainable usage as a social problem (an exception being a recent appeal by Save the Children to feed poor British children in the wake of biting austerity). It was not always like this, though. Food rationing formally ended in the UK in 1954, nine years after World War 2 had ended. British people did better than some on the continent in the aftermath of the war however: in his book Postwar, the late historian Tony Judt describes how in December 1945 residents of Budapest were officially provided with daily rations amounting to just 556 calories. The German average consumption for the two years after the war was 1,412 calories, but it was nearly half this figure in the American Zone. For some perspective, the NHS advises that the average man consumes 2,500 calories per day (2,000 calories for women) to maintain his weight. We manage it quite easily, demonstrated by the relatively new problem of obesity.
Nowadays, discussion of food injustice in Europe often relates to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Born out of Europe’s severe food shortages, the CAP was created to protect and promote European agriculture. As well as being a barrier to free trade, it does, unfortunately, have some highly regressive social consequences. A recent investigation by the New Statesman pointed out that ‘farmers’ (who do not need to farm) are paid according to the amount of land they own, not on their relative needs or productivity. As a result, in the UK, where a ‘cousinhood’ that can often trace its roots back to the Norman Conquest owns huge swathes of land, very rich people are given very large amounts of money. The average British household pays £245 towards the CAP, which may sometimes help small farmers, but often finds its way into the hands of wealthy aristocrats such as the Duke of Westminster, who received £748,716, or the Duke of Buccleuch, whose 240,000 acres earned him a tidy £260,273. Philippe Legrain calls for a land tax in his book Aftershock, partly because land’s distribution, especially in places like Britain, is so unequal. The regressive CAP merely adds to this injustice.
Judged dispassionately, the situation then seems very odd: we are paying large subsidies to rich people to grow food (or allow food to be grown on their inherited land), which we then very often throw away, mainly because we bought too much of it and it went bad. At the same time, there are still food shortages in poorer parts of the world, often culminating in mass starvation. Our food waste also contributes to climate change through the wasted energy use that goes into its production, which increases the likelihood that famines will break out in other parts of the globe.
Perhaps it is time for food to return to the policy table.