Behind our food drags a long, tangled chain of waste
For most of us lucky enough to have a kitchen to cook in, Covid times have meant we’ve had a bit of a snotklap about food waste. With almost every meal eaten at home, if not also cooked there, and with the urgent hunger of those without food and kitchens right outside, it’s unavoidable.
Suddenly the failed homemade loaf squatting on the counter threatening to develop mould has new value. Yay for us, using old bread for French toast instead of binning it, right? Actually, doing that should be a given. What’s scary is that a far larger volume of food waste lies out of sight, and we’re as complicit in it as we are in the throwing out old crusts, in strange and tangled ways.
We’re making savings at the end of a very long chain in which waste occurs at every stage. The quantities are extraordinary and hard to compute. Fruit and vegetables, for example, which we associate with the cleanest and greenest way of living, are the most wasteful food group — on average 45% is wasted across the chain.
The particular chain behind the fruit and veg you buy, coupled with your country’s systems, will affect this hugely. In poorer countries or on poorer farms, for instance, a lack of good equipment for harvest and storage means waste is an unavoidable, built-in given.
Our habits are formed largely by the invisibility factor. Prawn harvesting requires a word with more gravity than “waste”. It results in a more than tenfold greater by-catch of turtles, seabirds and other marine life, which are mostly thrown back, dead and unused. We continue to eat prawns because we can’t see this carnage a thousand miles out to sea. Would we cook a prawn curry for 10 at home, and bin nine of the portions? I’m guessing no.
Food production is far more complex than we imagine. A lot is made of buying “ugly” vegetables to stop supermarkets forcing farmers to waste the Quasimodos of the crop. In fact, this story is usually only half true. Often, these vegetables go to feeding livestock, as do the residues from grain crops. In fact, 80% of livestock feed is crop “waste”, which is why removing animals from the food system involves squandering more. The ugly vegetable thing is only the tip of a much more ominous iceberg.
In a food world in which big powers have absolute control over suppliers, and in which profit is always more important than feeding people, waste is completely built into the system. One mad example is that crops — watered, tended to, fit to eat, and ready for harvest — are often ploughed back into the soil because harvesting costs more than the farmer will get for the crop. Buyers have suddenly changed avenues, or the volumes required, or the prices and other deal-breaking aspects; politics in faraway lands may scupper the deal. This insanity is surreal.
Centralised, industrialised farming is fragile. Now, due to breakdowns in the processing chains caused by Covid-19, millions of animals in the US are being culled, or in industry terminology, “depopulated”.
Shifts in the system mean that a regimented industry can’t cope. Pigs need to be a certain measurement at slaughter, and are growing beyond that; already too-tight living conditions can’t manage when a ready batch of chickens can’t make way for the new; the country’s slaughterhouses are huge, centralised and more prone to human disease than smaller units. These are just some of the reasons that highlight the nightmarish and unsustainable nature of modern animal production and our food system in general. This is waste on a level for which there are no words. We’re seeing the apogee of the problem, but built in is an alarming element of frittering, even in “normal” times. Our largest, most powerful food corporations are built on a reductionist logic that renders them inflexible. They’re hard, not like rock, but like glass. The right word is brittle, which means they’re not only inflexible but also fragile. Sadly, the breakages will be born by those at their beck and call. The small suppliers are as dispensable as bread crusts.
And so, the sort of loaf we choose for the French toast in the first place, counts just as much as saving the crust from the bin. And that changed purchase does alter systems.
An essential move, if you want the shortcut default win, is — wherever possible — to support smaller and more visible food chains. This doesn’t, surprisingly, always mean local, but often it does. Going a step beyond that requires the active pursuit of information, and now seems like a good time to dig a bit. There are fascinating things happening at sea, on farms and even on coloured graphs. Read!
I LOVE: ● “The Hungry Season” by
Leonie Joubert (book)
● “Capitalism has Co-opted the Language of Food ”— The Conversation (online) ● “Finding Common Ground:
Land, Equity and Agriculture” by
Wandile Sihlobo (book)
● WWF SASSI: online resource for best, least wasteful seafood choices