Waste Not Want Not

The title of this blog comes from one of the many pithy rules for living that I heard so often as a child and more or less forgot or found quaint but unhelpful as I grew older.

Well, growing older still, this one has come back more and more in the last years as I hear and read more about food wastage and the size and ramifications of the problem. This blog in particular is spurred by a talk by Dr Brian Jones at the first of the Food@Sydney Seminar Series 2014 sponsored by the Environmental Institute of the University of Sydney, August 10 2014.

There were three speakers on the night:

• Ronni Khan, the indefatigable CEO of OzHarvest, the now Australia-wide organisation that re-distributes excess perishable food from commercial outlets like restaurants and supermarkets to charities throughout Australia providing meals to vulnerable people.
• Alex Iljadica, from Youth Food Movement Australia, whose aim is to make conscious consumers of young adults.
• Dr Brian Jones, Senior Lecturer,  University of Sydney.

Ronni's work is amazing, with food collected enough for something like 500,000 meals across Oz last year, and she has also spearheaded changes to legislation in four states around civil liabilities that allowed OzHarvest to be established.

I didn't make it to the  Youth Food Movement's Cropfest and Passata Day but they will be on my calendar for the upcoming year.

This blog though focuses on Brian Jones' talk which highlighted the systemic factors leading to food waste.

As I was heading off to the seminar, my good mate Tanya who has been in the waste policy business for many a year, said something along the lines of 'I hope they talk about waste at the production end which is much more an issue than waste at the consumption end'. And as it happens, Jones' talk was very much about this, though there are areas in which the production system and the consumer systems overlap to create waste.

Jones put up some slides from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation Save Food. Global Initiative on Food Loss and Waste Reduction which I have summarised here. In industrialised countries:

•  22% of global production of oils and pulses is lost or wasted every year, the majority of it at the production and distribution end.
• 30% of cereal crops are lost or wasted, the majority of this in industrialised countries being at the consumer end.
• 20% of dairy products are lost or wasted, with the majority of this happening at the consumer end for industrialised countries.
• 30% of seafood is lost or wasted, mostly in the production and distribution end globally, but about equally with with the consumer end for North America and Oceania.
• 45% of fruit and vegetables are lost or wasted, with the production and distribution end the overwhelming area in which this happens globally, though consumer wastage is high in industrialised countries.
• 20% of meat products are lost or wasted with the majority of this at the consumer end in industrialised countries.
• 45% of tubers and root foods are lost or wasted very largely at the production and distribution ends globally, but in North America and Oceania about one third is down to consumers.

 Jones focused on the drivers of loss and wastage at the production end identifying four factors:

• Quality standards which are consumer driven (though I would argue they are also health litigation driven).
• Weather and disease.
• Market forces where for example growers have to produce in excess of what will be bought at times (see below).
• Labour shortages that affect seasonal crops like stone fruit.

In NSW, Jones said, 1.1 million tonnes of food is thrown away each year. The direct cost to the consumer is more than $10000 per household per year.

As it happens, the August edition of The Monthly carries a story that looks at the duopoly that controls the Australian food market - that between Coles and Woolworths. Part of that story highlights the market force in creating wastage.

'Steve, a Woolworths-contracted lettuce grower who does not want to be identified, is destroying more produce than he used to farm.  The supermarket's orders very in volume, but Steve has to be ready to fill the largest one possible. He has duly increased the size of his farm. "I have to grow for the maximum size of an order, or else I lost the contract. So I grow on that scale even though the order is usually a lot less. Everything I don't sell, I have to destroy". '

Duopoly Money by Malcolm Knox

It is going to take more than consumer led action to change this as Knox's article shows as it looks at a range of areas in which the big two control not just the fresh produce market but increasingly more product areas like hardware (yes, Bunnings, the mega hardware store that has seen off the small business hardware and some of it's chain competitors, is owned by Wesfarmers which also owns Coles) and wine.

There is also probably little that can be done in the short term about the iron rule of use by and best by dates which have led us to rely on quite arbitrary standards (and believe me, I've looked for some clear guidelines on how to determine these to various products to give myself protection when selling my home made jams and pickles and basically the way they operate seems to be that it's up to the manufacturer to decide these for themselves, ie. there are no regulations governing these). At the forum when I raised this the panelists as one agreed that learning how to tell when food is off and how to deal with it when it is. as many of us did back in the day, - like scraping off the mould from a tub of yoghurt to get to the unmouldy and perfectly edible and safe lusciousness underneath, or smelling or looking at the colour of meat - are much less wasteful and waaaaaaaaaaaaaay less risky than trusting some manufacturer's fancy.


Projects like OzHarvest can make a significant impact at the consumption end, as can a range of domestic practices like composting, re-purposing (as they say these days) left-overs, only buying in small quantities and so on. This extends to consumer community action like community compost bins, or even something as simple as community cooking classes about using waste/unlovely fruit and veg.

And there is something consumers can do at the standards end. But is that so? That this may not have to be so is perfectly exemplified by the Inglorious Food campaign by the Intermarche franchise in France. The punchline in the video is that as a result of the campaign all the food identified as inglorious was sold. Granted, the fruit and vegetables were sold at a discounted price. Jones said that one of the big problems in Australia in trying to get past the 'cosmetic' factor in our fruit and veg purchases is that our fruit and veg are so relatively cheap there is no market for 'second grade' products.

But research done by the Youth Food Movement suggests there also may be some wiggle room in educating people about what a blemish or a fungus or a weird shape does or does not mean about the quality of the product. Alex reported, for example, that a high proportion of young people surveyed by them thought that a spot on fruit meant that it was poisoned.

Today at the growers' market to which I go, I was more than slightly taken aback when the young male of a couple next to me at a fruit stall dissuaded his partner from buying a blood orange because it had a red blush on a small part of its skin. It was one of those moments where I could have and indeed probably should have said something, thankless as it would have been. But next time, should there be the opportunity, I will take it.

Ronni's mantra on the night of the food forum was that we have to make the changes we want, and she is right. And sometimes if we are lucky, others join us and we can bring about the more systemic changes. I found a great resource that I am looking forward to reading for more ideas about what I can do at the small scale and what I can look at lobbying for - Reducing the Food Wastage Footprint. Toolkit.

Meanwhile, I will continue to rescue fruit and veg and bore people batless with posting on Facebook when I do but also hopefully giving them a nudge to do the same. I will keep cutting the bruised bits out of the fruit in the fruit bowl, turning the over ripe banana into a smoothie or a banana ca. I will keep composting what I can - we being a mostly vegan/vegetarian household have heaps of compostable material. And I will keep on standing up for the inglorious and consigning them to my cooking pots and pans with as much satisfaction, if not more, as their toned, botoxed, waxed peers.