My late mother was prone to repeating a long-cherished mantra: “waste not, want not”. Born into a pre-subsidy farming family where money was tight and work was hard, she found waste as close to sin as one could get.
Even when times got better she would not tolerate waste, whether it was in feeding livestock or the family.
Had she been here today she would have heartily welcomed an official report which calls for urgent action on food waste in Europe.
The House of Lords EU Committee report estimates at least 90 million tonnes of food is wasted across the EU each year.
The UK’s 15m tonnes of food waste is estimated to cost at least £5 billion a year.
The carbon footprint of worldwide waste is said to be equivalent to twice the global greenhouse gas emission of all road transportation in the USA.
Scottish Government figures, issued on the back of a new food waste campaign, estimate one-fifth of purchased food is wasted annually, amounting to 630,000 tonnes a year, and costing Scots £1bn.
By any standards these are eye-watering figures, and require action to redress the balance.
This is not the first time attention has been focused on a systemic issue which goes right to the heart of food production, distribution and consumption.
The House of Lords committee finds that efforts across the EU to reduce food waste are ‘fragmented and untargeted’, and calls on the new European Commission to publish a five-year strategy on food waste prevention within six months of taking office.
The report also calls for retailers, and in particular the big supermarkets who dominate food sales in the UK, to act more responsibly in limiting food waste by both farmers and consumers.
Supermarkets also need to work harder to avoid cancelling orders of food that has already been grown by producers, a practice which leads to unsold, but perfectly edible, food being ploughed back into the fields or left unharvested. Millions of tonnes of food are wasted annually in this way.
The committee is calling on the Government to consider reducing on-farm food waste within the CAP as a key objective given the economic benefits this could produce.
On a global scale, consumers in rich countries annually waste about 222m tonnes of food the equivalent to the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa. Fruit, vegetables and roots and tubers have the highest wastage rates.
The report welcomes the review on legislation regarding the feeding of food waste to animals. But it stresses that the transfer of human food waste to animals should only take place if backed by scientific evidence.
The painful irony is that while swathes of the world’s populations starve, the level of waste is alarming. It represents, on a global and local scale, a huge squandering of resources including water, land, and energy and needless production of greenhouse emissions.
There are fundamental issues at the heart of production that can be tackled, not least in developing countries where inadequate harvest techniques, poor post-harvest management and lack of suitable infrastructure directly contribute to waste.
But in middle- and high-income countries such as the UK, the level of waste is down to attitude and practice.
Consumers are often encouraged to buy more food than they need just look at the buy two for the price of one promotions in any supermarket, and of course the ubiquitous ‘best before’ date which then prompts us to throw something away we probably did not need in the first place.
A greater emphasis is needed on shoppers planning their purchases according to need, and not being lulled into the false economy of multiple offers.
Equally, supermarkets need to reassess their over-zealous passion for prescriptive quality standards which require every piece of fruit to look the same. Research has shown that consumers can be influenced as much by the concept of safe and tasty food as appearance.
Food waste is a local, national and global issue. The House of Lords report is timely in raising an issue for us all to consider. There is a role for producers, supermarkets and the Government to look innovatively at how waste is reduced.