At the end of last year, a pair of photos of a queue for food parcels outside the Capuchin day centre in Dublin 7 taken 100 years apart did the rounds on social media — followed by righteous tut-tutting that such a thing should even exist in 21st-century Ireland. Then, we all headed off to the supermarket and loaded our trollies with Christmas tucker, much of which ended up in the dustbin.
One million tonnes of food are thrown out by Irish businesses and consumers every year. Households are responsible for 300,000 tonnes of this, which means every home in the country dumps €700 worth of grub on average annually. At the same time, one in eight people in Ireland experience what is called “food poverty”: the inability to afford an adequate and nutritious diet.
According to FoodCloud, a social enterprise set up by Aoibheann O’Brien and Iseult Ward in 2013 to tackle the problem of food waste in Ireland by linking businesses with too much food to local charities that have too little, 1.3bn tonnes of food are wasted globally each year. To date, FoodCloud has facilitated redistribution of 653 tonnes of surplus food, or more than 1.4m meals, to Irish charities.
If a store has perfectly good food that it cannot sell, it uploads details via the FoodCloud app and a charity in the vicinity is notified that food is available for collection. The charity accepts the food and collects it. According to the FoodCloud website, it is a win-win deal: businesses contribute to their local communities and charities benefit by reducing food costs, allowing them to concentrate resources on their core missions. FoodCloud recently introduced food hubs in Galway, Cork, and Dublin to collect food from farmers, producers and manufacturers, and redistribute to charities.
There is no doubt that the redistribution of food that would otherwise go to landfill is a good thing, and that the motivation behind FoodCloud and food banks is noble, but some argue that such initiatives inadvertently make food waste acceptable. Writing on the online forum of the Agricultural and Rural Convention (Arc 2020), a non-governmental organisation that campaigns for better farming practices in the EU, Ruth Hegarty, a commentator on food and member of the team behind the Food On The Edge symposium, raised some doubts.
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“As I have watched ministers gleefully cutting the ribbons on new food banks and seen supermarkets issuing press releases and doing photo calls on how many ‘meals’ they have distributed, I’ve had an increasingly bad feeling about it all and can’t help wondering how farmers and growers, those who toiled to produce all this food, feel about it being given away,” she wrote. “There are hidden costs to all this ‘free’ food.
“For supermarkets, schemes that redistribute their surplus food to charities make complete sense. Not only do they have a cheap, clever and guilt-free way to deal with the increasingly costly and embarrassing problem of the huge amounts of food waste they generate, but they get do it under the guise of corporate social responsibility. They get roundly applauded for their ‘donations’ and even get to claim it contributes to their sustainability efforts. All the while we are further embedding the culture of food waste into the system and indeed making food waste more acceptable.”
O’Brien of FoodCloud agrees that there is no easy answer. “There is food waste in every sector, from retail to restaurant to domestic. The pattern that we all see at home is reflected across the supply chain. It’s a huge problem. Prevention is the first step, but where we at FoodCloud come in is at the second stage. There is waste of perfectly good food and we are trying to get it to the people who need it. What we do is work with partner supermarkets [Aldi and Tesco currently] to design a process to get the surplus redistributed.”
O’Brien says she and her colleagues have observed a growing willingness in the food industry to work with them to develop and improve solutions.
“It’s very encouraging. The problems are never straightforward, and the food system is very complex, but things are improving year on year. Our hub sites are taking in bigger bulk volume all the time, especially at this time of year, when producers and manufacturers may have a surplus of perfectly good stuff that was Christmas stock that now can’t be sold.
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“We are all responsible, and redistribution is definitely not the same as prevention. The ultimate goal is reduction of food waste but while there is surplus, it’s important it’s distributed to feed people. Obviously, we don’t have all the solutions, but we help with one of the problems and at the same time we raise awareness of the issue. Hopefully, in 10 or 20 years, food waste will become taboo in the way that litter has.”
In France, it is illegal for supermarkets to throw away safe food — it has to be donated to charity — but it is believed that some Irish supermarkets have decided not to engage with FoodCloud because they are afraid of getting sued. One member of staff at a small chain of supermarkets says that the branch where she works throws away perfectly edible food for this reason.
“Our contracts limit liability on the part of the supermarkets, and so long as everyone abides by the same food safety rules, there isn’t a problem,” says O’Brien. “But we find our model doesn’t suit some smaller supermarkets either because of their location or because they stay open late at night. The large multiples have systems in place to make it work. But our ambition is that if you have surplus food, you should redistribute it. We are not there yet, but there’s no reason why every business with surplus food can’t make a connection with a charity that needs it.”
British investigative food journalist Joanna Blythman has written extensively about the role supermarkets play in generating food waste and casts a cold eye over the good press that stores generate for themselves by teaming up with food banks and organisations such as FoodCloud.
“A waste-prevention strategy should never be confused with a poverty-reduction strategy,” she says. “Crumbs from the rich man’s table are a shallow and too easily self-aggrandising response to the unacceptable reality that millions of fellow citizens can’t afford to eat good, fresh food. Food banks are hugely well intended, but the truth is that they mainly dispense the sugary, starchy, processed food that people with more money and options actively avoid on health grounds — and the banks also actively decline donations of fresh food.
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“What’s more, the red herring of food poverty draws attention further away from one essential fact about supermarkets that we must digest if we are ever to make any progress: waste is hard-wired into the system.”
Blythman and Hegarty both blame supermarkets for creating a culture in which people buy more food than they need. Who hasn’t been seduced by a buy-one-get-one-free deal? The sell by, best before and use by dates on packaging encourage us to throw food away once the label says so, rather than using our instincts and common sense to judge when food is no longer fit for consumption. We grew up trusting our senses of smell, sight and touch to tell us whether food was fine to eat, but now many of us look at the label.
“There aren’t, to my knowledge, any robust statistics on levels of food waste in British households before the supermarket era, but I’d hazard a guess that they were much lower than they are now,” says Blythman. “Our rubbish bins really started filling up when, instead of shopping for a little, as was needed, every day or two, we were persuaded to adopt the one-stop supermarket shopping trip.
“Theoretically, armed with a list, we could buy all the food we needed for a week. Nowadays, supermarket online ordering makes that even easier to do — just press the ‘same as last week’ option. So supermarkets egg us on to overlook what we already have and to buy much more than we need. They encourage us to hazard a weekly guess about what we’ll consume, rather than focusing on what’s in our fridges and larders day-to-day.
“If the untouched remnants of last week’s order are stacking up in the fridge when the supermarket van arrives at our door, most people will consign them to the bin, schooled to believe, thanks to supermarket use by and best before dates, that judging freshness is best left to distant experts. Once we sniffed the milk and pared mould off cheese, now we live in dread of poisoning.
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“But sell-by dates — the progenitor of use by and best before — were introduced by supermarkets as stock rotation tools, to help clunky, mammoth chains keep tabs on the unprecedented amount of product passing through their system, not primarily as safeguards against food poisoning.”
So prevention is better than the waste reduction “cure”, but perhaps that cure is better than nothing.
Planning is key weapon in McEvoy’s war on waste
Galway’s Enda McEvoy of Loam restaurant has some practical advice on waste and how to avoid it
At his Michelin-starred restaurant in Galway, chef Enda McEvoy is on a mission to eliminate food waste from his kitchen. His efforts have been recognised by the Sustainable Restaurant Association with a 3-star food made good award. Among Loam’s award-winning sustainable practices are its indoor grow-boxes for herbs and flowers for the restaurant tables, a short menu that minimises food waste, the kitchen’s use of pickling and fermenting when crops are abundant, a commitment to composting, and participation in food education at local schools.
McEvoy’s tips for reducing food waste at home
0 Plan before you shop — have an idea of what you have in your kitchen cupboards and an outline of a meal plan in your head before you go to buy food. This cuts out a lot of waste.
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0 If you live close to the shops, buy little and often; we are lucky to live close to the stores, so we go shopping every day as opposed to once a week – it may not suit everyone, but it works for us.
0 Use up leftovers. For instance, leftover ham makes a great carbonara the next day, A huge hit in our house, simple carbonara involves just cooking some pasta, chopping up leftover ham and grating some Parmesan cheese. Heat a pan and throw in ham and a clove of chopped garlic, throw in cooked pasta and a tiny bit of pasta water, beat together a couple of eggs and combine with grated cheese and add into the pasta. Grate a little cheese on top.
0 Make leftovers into lunch — almost anything can be stuck in a wrap and, with the right condiments, made into a decent sandwich.
0 Food packaging is a huge problem. Shop to try to avoid this. Choose the loose fruit and vegetables to put in your basket, as opposed to the pre-packaged stuff.
0 More and more areas have food compost bins — or you can buy a bin and make your own compost at home. This way, at least you are recycling the food that does inevitably end up being thrown out.
0 Storage — if you have the space, always store fruit and veg loose in the fridge as it lasts longer.
0 Pickling, fermenting, and jam-making can be great ways of using up fruit and veg when you have, for example, an abundant crop from an apple tree or even if there is a great deal at the grocer’s. There can be a great sense of satisfaction in eating your homemade pickles a few months down the line. Check out Sandor Katz’s book The Art of Fermentation on this subject.
0 Utilise the freezer. A big freezer is a great investment; when meat is about to go out of date, stick it in the freezer and you can add a couple of months onto its life.
Zero tolerance approach
Silo in the English seaside town of Brighton is the world’s first zero-waste restaurant. All food not consumed by customers or staff is fed to an aerobic digester that can generate 60kg of compost in 24 hours. Furniture is upcycled, plates are made from plastic bags, and tables from industrial floor tiles. The food is said to be very good.
The Real Junk Food Project, the UK’s first food waste supermarket, opened in Pudsey, Leeds, last year and there are plans to open more branches. Customers pay whatever they can afford.
In the US, Hungry Harvest is tackling the problem of the 20% of fruit and vegetables that go to waste because of aesthetic imperfections or logistical inefficiencies, such as an unusually good harvest. Hungry Harvest believes that no produce should be thrown away, so they source, package and deliver items at a discount.