WASTE NOT, WANT NOT
It will take more than just eating wonky carrots to reduce Scotland’s food waste mountain, says Louise Gray – it is up to farmers, supermarkets, and, most importantly, you...
The Kingdom of Fife makes perfect carrot country. The cool climate and sandy land allows root vegetables to burrow deep into the soil and develop a sweet juicy flavour. All down the east coast the feathery fronds of carrot tops are part of the crop rotation, allowing Scotland to produce a quarter of a million tonnes of the vegetables, much of which is exported to England and the Continent.
I pluck a cartoonish carrot from the earth and munch on it like Bugs Bunny. Sure enough it is perfectly sweet and crunchy. There are even different coloured ‘Imperator’ carrots in purple, red and yellow to taste. But there is something I am not quite happy with. I did not come here looking for perfect carrots, I came here looking for wonky carrots. I carry on plucking carrots from the ground until I find one, or rather two, wonky carrots, coiled around each other like lovers. I brandish my prize. ‘Aha! Food waste! Now what are we going to do about that?’ Pearson Whyte, the long-suffering agronomist from Kettle Produce, who is showing me around, looks a little confused. ‘Er, we put them in soup.’
‘Oh.’
I was under the impression that these wonky carrots were wasted, that if we could just find a use for these unfortunate outcasts of the vegetable world then the problem of food waste would at last be solved. But most farmers do manage to find a use for wonky carrots, whether in processing for food like soups or baby food, or right at the bottom end of the scale, for animal feed.
Kettle Produce, Scotland’s biggest carrot producer, has a processing factory
in Fife that turns any outsize carrots into convenience foods like soup mixes and ‘carrot spaghetti’. ‘We grow different crops for different uses,’ says Pearson. ‘There can be some crossover of sizing but because we have sales of packing and processing, this helps to maximise usability per acre.’
Morrisons, Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Lidl all now stock ‘wonky’ veg ranges for a cheaper price in order to try and reduce waste. That does not mean more could not be done to find homes for the wasted parts of outsize vegetables, but if we really want to solve the problem of food waste it is going to take more than just eating more wonky carrots.
Globally, and in Scotland, about a third of the food produced never gets eaten by people. This is not only an embarrassment in terms of our international reputation for parsimony, but in a world where climate change and population growth is increasing pressure on resources, we arguably have a moral duty to make food go further.
WRAP, the UK government agency in charge of waste, estimates that ten million tonnes of food is wasted ‘post farmgate’ in the UK. A small proportion of this is wasted in manufacturing and retailing but the majority, 7.1 million tonnes, is wasted in the home. In Scotland it is 1.35 million tonnes of food every year.
The biggest waste is fresh produce like potatoes, bagged salad and carrots, but
we also put vast amounts of bread, biscuits and ready meals in the bin. Most of that food is perfectly edible, for example bread crusts, wilted lettuce that could be revived in cold water or carrots left in the cupboard too long and allowed to shrivel.
Zero Waste Scotland, the agency in charge of meeting our ambitious target to bring food waste down by 33%, believe education is key. The agency point out that a family of four could save £70 a month just by cutting food waste. To help families do so, it publishes recipes and tips on how to cut waste in the home.
Finally there is the question of what to do with the carrot peelings and other items of food waste that cannot be eaten – presuming you don’t have pigs and chickens. In Scotland 56% of us separate our food waste from general waste, against 26% in 2012. While it is an impressive increase it could be a lot more if people understood the benefits of recycling food waste.
As a resident of Edinburgh my food waste – including carrot peelings – is recycled at the Biogen plant in Millerhill, just outside the city. On a visit I watch the lorries dump loads of compostable plastic sacks in the huge holding bay. I can’t say it is a pleasant smell – the nearest equivalent is pig slurry. Any packaging or plastic is removed by a toothed machine called
“
In Scotland about a third of the food produced never gets eaten by people
a ‘Tiger’ and the remaining macerated gunk is sent to be ‘digested’ for 40 days in a huge silo.
At the end of this period the methane or ‘biogas’ is burned to produce electricity and the liquid digestate is sent to use as fertiliser on farms. Scott Hardingham, the general manager, describes it as a huge stomach producing what most stomachs produce – hot air and fertiliser. The plant can power 3,500 homes in Edinburgh.
Zero Waste Scotland claim that if half of our food waste could be treated through AD plants like this, the electricity generated could power a city the size of Dundee for six months, provide heat for local homes and businesses and produce enough fertiliser for 10% of Scotland’s arable crop needs.
This idea that my food waste is now powering my house or a ‘circular’ economy, seems common sense to me, especially as fossil fuel energy becomes more expensive. It may be easier to blame farmers for growing wonky carrots, or supermarkets for being fussy, but if we really want to cut food waste, perhaps we should start by looking in our own fridges first.