Every few weeks, it seems, we’re treated to a swathe of articles across the media aimed at helping us to waste less food. It has recently been recognised that food waste is not merely a symptom of our growing food insecurity – thrown into sharp relief by the pandemic – but a cause of it too. Food waste accounts for approximately 6-8% of all human carbon emissions, with approximately a third of the food the world produces – some estimates run as high as 40% - going to waste. Rotting food in landfill produces the greenhouse gas methane, which is directly linked to climate change, but it’s also a huge waste of all the precious energy used to grow, harvest, package and transport that food. It is a senseless crisis on both an environmental and a humanitarian level, with famines raging across the globe while perfectly edible food rots in dumpsters thousands of miles away.
It’s a no-brainer that we need to stop wasting food. What is less clear, however, is whether the solution really lies in yet another feature from a celebrity chef instructing us how to repurpose our leftovers. One of the problems with this was succinctly illustrated by an article in The Times in July 2021, entitled ‘Fighting Food Waste – The Italian Way’. In this article, ‘superchef’ Massimo Bottura – of Osteria Francescana, famous for its ‘dropped lemon tart’ dessert – noted, quite rightly, that it’s a crime to allow the building blocks of Italian cuisine – pasta, bread, cheese – to go to waste. One of the solutions posited was a recipe for a pasta pie designed to help you use up those leftovers. Said pie involved making a bechamel sauce and required you to have approximately ten other ingredients kicking around in your fridge.
And therein lies the problem. It has become increasingly apparent to me over the past few years, as the kind of person perhaps most likely to come into contact with these sorts of articles, that they are targeting completely the wrong demographic. If I took a quick inventory of my fridge and freezer right now, I’d find: the leftover whey from making yoghurt, in a plastic tub waiting to be used in breadmaking; breadcrumbs from stale bread, frozen to use as a topping for gratins; some leftover sweetened raspberry pulp from making frozen yoghurt, which will later be used to flavour kombucha; old parmesan rinds, which at some point will go into a soup or risotto to add plenty of umami flavour; odds and ends of vegetables – carrot peelings, the tops and bottoms of leeks, the pods of peas, the shells of broad beans, the ends of onions – that will be simmered at the weekend into a vegetable stock; a frozen bag of prawn shells that will later become the base for a bisque.
I do not need more articles on how to avoid food waste, because by now it is built into the fabric of my life. I am borderline incapable of throwing food away. I will use up every last scrap in one way or another, unless it poses an imminent risk to my life (I draw the line at blue meat or orange polka dots atop my cream cheese, but will happily cut mould off bread or scrape it off jam). I take pride in finding wonderful ways to repurpose food that would otherwise go in the bin. Some of my best soda breads and scones have been made with a random assortment of soured milk and cream from the fridge, or even the liquid drained from a ball of mozzarella, and I have lost count of the number of times I’ve made a batch of financiers to use up egg whites from making ice cream and whatever past-its-best fruit or berries I’ve got lying around. Leftover pastry scraps become baked and used in a cheesecake base at a later date (thanks to Nadiya Hussain for that tip). Squashy fruit is given a new lease of life as a smoothie.
But clearly, I’m in the minority here. We are still wasting food, by the truckload. Might it not be time to start looking more closely at why?
Because surely, surely, it is not down to lack of recipes. Surely it’s not because people are standing there contemplating their fruit bowl and thinking ‘if ONLY I knew what to do with this black banana!’ The majority of the population have access to the internet. It takes seconds to clock those blackening bananas in your fruit bowl and acquire a recipe to help you make the most of them – not just one, but thousands, with levels of complexity and combinations of ingredients to suit every requirement and dietary preference. Ditto sour milk. Ditto stale bread. Ditto pretty much anything you’ve got weighing on your conscience in your fridge or cupboard – the internet provides. So why are we still bombarding people with the same old articles, when they clearly don’t work? We have millions of recipes. We are still wasting food.
The kind of person reading your Times article about the world-saving pasta pie is very likely the kind of person who already stockpiles breadcrumbs and parmesan rinds. These recipes are pointlessly targeting the people who will already have pangs of conscience around food waste and so are probably already engaged in minimising said waste. This messaging is telling them nothing they don’t already know. They might pick up a fun new tip on ways to use up those pastry scraps, but this is not going to enact major behavioural change – the kind of change needed – because those people are already at the coalface of that change. What about those who are actually throwing their bananas in the bin and pouring their milk down the drain?
The problem is, that to really tackle food waste on a meaningful level, we need to engage with the complex and often unsavoury realities behind the issue.
Food waste is confusing. On the surface, it makes no sense and is hard to explain. Why would you throw away something that can be eaten? I have very well-educated, privileged, middle-class friends who I have seen throw away a full tray of leftovers because they couldn’t be bothered to deal with them. I’ve seen an entire plate of freshly-baked jam tarts go into the bin simply because everyone had eaten their fill, and the apparent logical next step was to throw the surplus away. I don’t even want to dredge up the traumatic memories of attending a cookbook shoot, where whole meals and packages of unopened fresh ingredients were chucked into a black bin bag at the end. Yes: those glossy lifestyle shots strewn across the pages of the expensive cookbooks you love to leaf through come at more than a financial cost.
Let’s go off on a seeming tangent for a second. In 2004, BP (British Petroleum) popularised the term ‘carbon footprint’, launching a carbon footprint ‘calculator’ so that each individual could assess how much his or her lifestyle was contributing to the climate crisis. As this article points out, it was ‘one of the most successful, deceptive PR campaigns maybe ever’, designed to ‘manipulate our thinking about one of the greatest environmental threats of our time’. BP produces millions of barrels of oil and gas every day, investing a tiny proportion (less than 3%) of its budget in renewable energy sources. They’re certainly not about to reduce their own carbon footprint any time soon, but intend to displace the responsibility onto the average consumer, hoping that our guilt around taking the car to the shops or jetting off to the Med twice a year will distract us from the fact that companies like themselves are destroying our planet on a colossal scale and have no plans to slow down. The burden is foisted onto the individual, along with all of the guilt and anxiety that comes with it.
How much of food waste is a systemic, institutionalised problem that has been shifted, along with accompanying culpability and guilt, onto the individual consumer? As @foodycatAlicia pointed out when I discussed this on twitter: how responsible are we, really, for the food going off in our fridge? How long has that food been in storage or transit, with the opportunity to deteriorate on the way? Might it have been improperly stored or handled, leading to increased perishability? ‘Saving’ that bread or banana before it goes off is not going to change the fact that a shocking quantity of food is wasted before it even gets to our kitchens. There is also the thorny issue of sell-by dates, which have been associated with unnecessary food waste – many see them as gospel rather than guideline, not daring to rely on the evidence of their own eyes or nose. Supermarkets are going some way to address this issue. In Norway, many manufacturers have replaced the ‘sell-by’ or ‘use-by’ phrase before the date with the label ‘beste før, ofte god etter’, which translates as ‘Best before, often good after’, and an accompanying graphic urging the consumer to ‘Se, luk, smak’ (look, smell, taste). In the UK, Tesco announced in 2018 that it was removing these dates from some of its products in an attempt to avoid waste. It’s something, but it’s not enough. Supermarkets, cafes and restaurants are a huge contributor to food waste, as several documentaries around ‘dumpster diving’ have pointed out, with tons of perfectly good food thrown into skips where, in many countries, it is illegal for the individual to retrieve it. All this is far bigger than a harassed parent tipping the kids’ leftovers into the bin one night or a single person pouring away the milk they haven’t managed to finish over the course of a week. Clever marketing and PR has, once again, foisted the blame onto us, with the media complicit in making us feel guilty if we don’t have time to turn those odds and ends of cheese into a quiche, or make healthy crisps out of our vegetable peelings.
These articles and recipes also ignore other, even more complex, parts of the problem. It’s all very well offering us the Michelin-starred chefs’ ways of dealing with their sourdough excess, but those ‘solutions’ often assume that you possess a well-stocked storecupboard and – often overlooked – the means to whip up those food-saving recipes. What if the reason you’re ‘wasting’ food is because you can’t afford to run a fridge or freezer to keep it fresh for longer? What if you can’t batch cook, because you can’t afford the electricity or don’t have a proper hob or oven? What if you are living in temporary accommodation without access to proper kitchen facilities? What if you simply don’t have the cooking skills to repurpose any leftovers at all, relying on convenience food that you can’t store or reheat (or that would be unpalatable if saved and reheated)? To blithely advise people to grate their sourdough into crumbs for the freezer assumes incredible privilege – and physical ability – on so many levels. Food waste – as with food poverty, to which it is surely linked – is intricately bound up with class and education. Asking star chefs to champion the anti-food waste narrative is spectacularly missing the point if you want to reach out to people for whom the concept of a Michelin star might be as alien as the concept of financial security. These are not relatable narratives.
I could go on. What if you have a mental health issue, perhaps an eating disorder that causes you anxiety around food? What if you know you can’t resist the temptation of leftovers, so throw them in the bin before you have to deal with the significant stress they cause? I remember an old ‘diet tip’ from the nineties instructing you to pour washing up liquid on leftovers to avoid temptation. Horrifying on many levels, but an indicator of the under-discussed connection between mental health issues and food waste. What if you’re simply too depressed to ‘meal plan’, unable to see further in life than getting out of bed in the morning? What if you’re dealing with a colossal anxiety disorder that does not allow you the headspace to imagine a future trajectory for that wilting bag of salad in the fridge drawer?
Speaking from personal experience, it is absolutely exhausting to keep on top of a fully-stocked kitchen and avoid letting anything go to waste, particularly when you have a small household or live alone, since most shops still sell groceries in quantities catering for the nuclear family (why, when the recommended/average serving of pasta is 100g, do they sell it in 500g bags? Explain this to me). For me it is a source of intense anxiety, and I’m privileged, have access to a vast range of kitchen tools, and am blessed with friends who will show up at short notice to eat the results. I cannot even imagine how anxious I might be if I didn’t have all of the above. It is mind-numbingly exhausting to constantly monitor the contents of your cupboards for signs of deterioration, and then act accordingly, often in ways that involve buying myriad other ingredients in order to repurpose the offending parmesan rind or black banana (I wrote about this, and the mythical concept of ‘larder zero’, here). It is exhausting to simultaneously shoulder the guilt and burden of what we are doing to the planet, and realise that making one more soda bread is going to achieve absolutely nothing. I don’t have a family to care for (unless you count 120 houseplants), nor a stressful job or financial worries to throw into the mix. I’m one of the ones who can whip up Bottura’s pasta pie. It’s those who can’t that we need to be reaching out to with our narratives. But in order to do so, we need to learn a whole lot more about what drives this relentless food waste we keep hearing so much about.
We need to detach the narrative from facetious lists of banana bread recipes and ‘kitchen hacks’. We need to start accommodating questions of class, privilege, education and mental health, and all the thorny, tangled issues that accompany them. We have already started to realise this when it comes to the shocking case of food poverty, and the dialogue needs to continue. I am no expert, but there are experts out there who need to start being invited to weigh in on the conversation. People living in food poverty. People who run food banks. Mental health professionals. Government ministers. But bombarding us with more and more recipes, particularly championed by star chefs, is not the answer. ‘Let them eat banana bread’ isn’t going to cut it for much longer.