Food waste will always be with us, to misquote the Bible unless all 63M of us are prepared to return to subsistence living, growing our own food and keeping chickens or pigs to eat all of our peelings and other inedible parts of the food we consume. However the scale and nature of our food waste is something that we can control. At a domestic level it is vital that we all improve the way we manage the food we have in our fridges and ambient cupboards leading to a great deal less food being thrown away which has never been opened. Our municipal refuse collectors also need to  focus on the food waste that many of us generate, this waste has a very high calorific value and it is too important to be buried in landfill sites. Our food suppliers, both wholesale and retail and food producers also need to do more to re-use this important resource, once it is no longer commercially viable for them to sell. One of the ways of doing this is to work closely with a service such as FareShare which can distribute surplus food to charities that will ensure that the food is eaten by people who otherwise would not be well fed.

Waste food is a significant issue for two reasons. It costs a great deal to purchase and if dealt with effectively it can continue to be an asset. The financial equation is vital for all of us to understand. Last week a thinly veiled attack by Priti Patel in the Daily Telegraph focused on the 14 charities in the UK that help us as a nation to provide foreign aid across the world. This was followed by Justine Greening, the overseas aid Minister who also challenged the same charities to be more transparent. The knock on effect was a flurry of discussions about the nature of aid itself and led to Godfrey Bloom and his Bongo Bongo land speech (if you can call it that!) . The link to food waste is that governmentally organised foreign aid represents 0.7% of our GDP and food waste amounts to twice this figure. I don’t plan to focus on overseas aid in this posting but do consider reading this piece from Sundays Independent newspaper which provides a brief explanation why we should continue to provide this.  If instead of speaking nonsense about overseas aid and the charities that help dispense it, our politicians were to focus their energy on diminishing food waste, we would all be a great deal better off.

Once we have reached the place where our municipal waste has been collected the most effective way of dealing with it is to use anerobic digestion to reclaim some of the energy that was used to produce the food in the first place. The AD industry is investing funds in the machinery needed as we speak, check out this article, but it is vital that we do not allow them to over invest. The cost will inevitably be passed to you and I through our community charge and these large pieces of equipment once built and commissioned need to be run efficiently. This means that if there is not sufficient food waste being collected from you and I, that these companies might try to persuade the wholesalers and retailers to supply them with their waste direct. This would be a disaster as this food will never be offered to people for whom it was originally produced. The people that schemes such as FareShare support are generally people whose diet would otherwise be very poor or non existent. The availability of this food well prepared can help improve the health of people who would otherwise place a heavy demand on the NHS, or put another way, if we deal with food waste well, we can reduce health costs, reduce food waste costs and through AD reduce our fuel costs and costs of landfill. All of these benefits could be seen as the charity for those of us at home that Godfrey Bloom was referring to and the papers have been putting in the headlines. It may actually be possible for us to have some cake and allow others to eat it too!