There are endless disturbing facts and figures around how much food is wasted every day in the UK, these numbers are usually accompanied by some data about how many people are going hungry or the number of foodbank parcels given out each week. It’s enough to make you feel really quite angry, how can we still be letting perfectly good food go to landfill? It’s not for want of trying, there are groups and charities across the country that are fighting tooth and nail to save the “waste” food. But there, in that statement, shows how we have become accustomed to referring to perfectly edible food as “waste”, we must reframe that narrative. Calling it waste food simply blurs the reality and allows the supermarkets and industries that are doing the wasting to get away with it as people assume ‘waste food’ means poor quality or ‘second hand’, but it doesn’t, we’ve seen crates and crates of perfectly shaped and scrumptious fruit & veg that’s destined for landfill. Even using the term ‘surplus food’ has problematic connotations as it is certainly not surplus to requirement to those that don’t know where their next meal is coming from. The government does not require supermarkets to report on how much food they are wasting, the only big supermarket that does is Tescos and that is voluntarily. If people knew just how much perfectly edible food was being thrown away perhaps there would be more pressure on the government to put in place laws to change it, after all Britain wastes the most food in Europe. 

 

Locally we have a number of groups who work on rescuing and redistributing food, Brighton based organisation the Real Junk Food Project promotes the hashtag #feedbelliesnotbins which is a message we fully stand behind. In Denton in Newhaven there’s the Havens Food Cooperative which has a team of volunteers collecting food directly from supermarkets that would otherwise be thrown away at the end of the day due to sell-by dates. Familiarising yourself with what the different dates mean on packaging is an important step to reducing food wastage; a sell-by date is not a food safety indicator and the government guidelines are that food is still fine to eat after it’s sell-by date (and it’s best-before date), the only date which we should not eat food after is the ‘use-by’ date and yet supermarkets will throw food away based on an arbitrary date that dictates that a product needs to be binned, rather than letting people rely on their senses. Thankfully, groups like the Havens Food Cooperative are collecting this food before it’s chucked out and redistributing it to households in need in the local area. Finally, the Big Cheese of the food waste/surplus/redistribution network is Fareshare, a charity with a huge operation to redistribute food to charities and community groups across the country (18,500 charities according to their website).