Thanks to reader Cat who found a fascinating read in the Financial Times about the massive waste in the Big Food industry. Actually, if anything it's the larger businesses that have refined the art of maximizing their food but even still, the numbers are shocking. As I've mentioned many times before, Joelle and I always are checking the shelves for special prices on food that needs to move. Some foods last much longer than the listed dates (quality yogurt comes to mind) but the freezer always welcomes new arrivals. This FT article is a real eye opener that exposes the significant waste in the UK though it's hard to imagine radically different results elsewhere in the industrialized world. It's definitely a good read.
Soon after graduating, I started to work on a media campaign about food waste. I took newspaper, radio and television crews round the back of supermarkets and showed them what was being thrown away. The level of interest was overwhelming. Early on in that process, a BBC journalist persuaded me to make a feature for the Politics Show in 2003. She set up an interview with Lord Haskins, then one of the chief advisers to the government on food and farming and the former chairman of Northern Foods, one of Britain’s largest food-processing companies. I was just preparing my tirade when Lord Haskins launched into his own: sell-by dates were absurdly strict and, by his estimation, an incredible 70 per cent of all food produced was wasted. I nearly fell off the park bench we were sitting on. This was the highest figure I had heard, and it was coming not from a campaigner but from a senior member of the food industry. My hunch about the scale of the problem was confirmed.
In terms of back-of-store waste, smaller shops and chains often perform worse than large supermarkets. Timothy Jones, a specialist on food waste in the US, claims that the best-managed supermarket chains in north America have “leaned down” their waste to less than 1 per cent of the food coming into the stores. Convenience stores as a sub-sector compare unfavourably, with average wastage levels of 26 per cent. However, this should not distract from the fact that supermarkets hide much of their waste by pushing it further up the supply chain, forcing manufacturers and farmers to discard huge amounts of edible produce.
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