At last – a slogan that speaks sense about our food waste mountain
Among all the other trying aspects of life as it is currently configured, I find myself becoming savagely fed up with the hortatory tone in which our leaders habitually address us. In the free-range era before the virus, the endlessly repeated anti-terrorism incantation of “See it.
Say it. Sorted” on the London transport system used to make me grind my teeth with vexation. Yet it now seems as mild an irritation as a wasp at a picnic, compared with the maddening biohazardy jingles that have accompanied every stage of the pandemic’s progress.
“Hands. Face. Space”, “Stay alert. Control the virus. Save lives” and its equally noxious variant, “Stay home. Protect the NHS. Save lives”; the perky “Eat out to help out” of high summer, and its baleful winter corrective, the “Rule of six” – I have no idea whether these relentless coinages have any measurable effect on people’s behaviour. But here comes another one.
On the bright side, “Look. Smell. Taste. Don’t waste” makes a nice change from Covidian imperatives. And with its faint but unmistakable echo of rousing wartime sloganry – “Make do and mend”, “Lend a hand on the land” – it seems to deserve some more inspiring artwork than the primitive stick drawings of an eye, a nose and a stuck-out tongue that will feature in a campaign intended to persuade us to ignore the “Best before” dates on our food packaging.
Supported by Defra and the sustainability charity, Wrap, some 30 food brands have joined a national initiative whose purpose is to reduce the 4.5 million tonnes of perfectly edible food annually thrown away in the UK. Even the well-nourished pig on a 1943 Ministry of Food poster, waving a jovial trotter beneath the slogan “We want your kitchen waste”, might be taken aback at the size of our national waste food mountain, much of it discarded in response to the confusing safety advice offered by producers and manufacturers.
“Use by”, “Display until”, “Best before” – it takes a confident cook to decide that their loved ones are unlikely to be poisoned by a macaroni cheese made with the gratings of an elderly bit of cheddar. And many of us are no longer confident in our own kitchens. The reasons are complex: the long decline in school domestic science lessons (now reintroduced into the national curriculum); the predominance of ready meals and takeaways; the lingering effects of food scandals.
But food no longer feels like the casual commodity that it was before the pandemic: the once frictionless business of shopping has become harder and more expensive, and the Food Standards Agency reports a steady increase in the number of people attending food banks. For others, cooking has been a welcome distraction from confinement. Making food from scratch creates a familiarity and respect for ingredients, which eventually fosters an instinctive sense of whether or not they are wholesome, whatever the dates on the packaging may claim.
Whether the latest slogan will succeed in turning us into fearless repurposers of leftovers – whizzing stale bread into breadcrumbs and dutifully turning sour milk into cream cheese – remains to be seen. When “normal” life returns, so may our wasteful old habits. But if there is any virtuous legacy of the pandemic (an unlikely proposition, I admit), it may be to make some of us reconsider our relationship with what we eat.