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Feeding the 5000 and saving the world

Written by Jo Caird
Thursday, 17 December 2009 00:00

The day may have been bitterly cold, with snow sometimes blurring our view of the people making speeches and doing demonstrations on the stage in front of the National Gallery, but the mood at Feeding the 5000 was as warm as the plates of steaming vegetable curry being handed out to the hungry Trafalgar Square crowd.

Dreamt up by Tristram Stuart, author of Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, the event sought to highlight the fact that almost 50% of all food grown in the UK is wasted, with UK households throwing away 25% of the food they buy. To raise awareness of the environmental and social impact of wasting such quantities of food worldwide, and show people how easy it is to reduce waste, Stuart joined forces with partner organisations Save the Children, ActionAid, This is Rubbish and FareShare to put on a feast for 5000 members of the public using food that would otherwise have gone to waste.

Vegetable curry was made with vegetables too oddly shaped, coloured or sized to make it to supermarket shelves, smoothies were whipped up from unwanted fruit rescued from a London wholesaler, and goody bags of fruit, vegetables and fresh herbs were handed out to all attendees.  
Russell Webb, who works near Trafalgar Square and dropped in for a free plate of food, says that although he tries not to be too wasteful, “it’s good to get a reminder” via events like this one. New Yorker Pamela Parker was already familiar with the issue of food waste before coming to Feeding the 5000, but acknowledges the importance of “people seeing just how much is being wasted on a daily basis, and tasting it too”.

The high levels of food waste in the UK are caused by factors at every link of the supply chain. Sarah Pettit of the National Farmers’ Union owns a farm in Lincolnshire that supplies leading UK supermarkets. She explains that large proportions of every potential harvest are left to rot in the fields because they do not conform to supermarkets’ stringent guidelines as to shape and size. The reason? Supermarkets use ‘perfect’ fruit and vegetables as part of their branding in order to entice the consumer with images of high quality and abundance. The result is that “we have been tailored to believe that everything comes perfectly shaped, coloured and sized, in perfect packaging, so we buy with our eyes and not with our brains”.

Pettit would like customers to “demand from their supermarkets more variability in shapes and sizes”, and believes that the savings subsquently made further up the supply chain would mean greater value for the consumer.

Rachel Solnick, who co-founded This Is Rubbish, an organisation dedicated to educating people in the UK about food waste and the group responsible for the thousands of tasty smoothies served at Feeding the 5000, would like to see the creation of an annual independent audit of how much food supermarkets are wasting. “At the moment none of those figures are available. They don’t exist and they’re not asked for. We don’t mean just the food that they can’t sell, but all the waste higher up the supply chain: food waste from damages, overordering. We would also ask for annual reductions, once the figures are known.”

As far as the waste that occurs in the home, the people behind Feeding the 5000 emphasise how easy it is to reduce what we throw away. Just by thinking about what we buy in advance, making a shopping list, and only buying what we need, great reductions can be made. At the event itself, chefs Thomasina Miers of Mexican restaurant Wahaca and Jeremy Lee of Blue Print Café did onstage demonstrations to show how to make the most of the food we buy. Tristram Stuart claims most of his food from supermarket bins as a protest against waste, but he stresses that people can make a huge difference just by making small changes: “there’s a really easy solution to this global problem and that is to eat food and enjoy it and to value food for what it is.”

The other side of the problem of food waste in this country is the huge number of people without access to good quality, nutritious food. FareShare, another of Feeding the 5000’s partner organisations, every day supplies 29,000 disadvantaged people with meals, sourcing food from manufacturers and retailers across the UK. Tony Lowe, the charity’s CEO, lays the blame for the enormous amount of food wasted squarely at the feet of the food companies: “they are designed to sell. When they can’t sell food anymore, they just give up and throw it away, so we’re pushing this message about an ethical supply chain, saying that if you’ve got food that can be eaten and can’t be sold then it should go to people first, the most vulnerable in our society. We want the food companies to commit to this supply chain”.

But while educating consumers to make better decisions about the food they buy and eat may be relatively simple, talking manufacturers and retailers into investing in this ethical supply chain is no easy task. Lowe explains that persuading them to admit that there is a problem in the first place is tricky enough; “then you have to get them to commit. Getting the food from them is difficult because they have systems and processes to release it, so there’s a bit of investment needed and some are reluctant to do that”.

“The irony”, he says, “is that even though we charge for our services, it’s cheaper to pay us to give the food to people to eat than it is to pay to destroy it. In the long term it saves them money.”

If the cheerful spirit among the crowds and volunteers on the day at Feeding the 5000 isn’t enough to inspire a sense of hope about the potential for reducing UK food waste in the future – and it’s always wise to bear in mind those who attend events of this kind tend to be those already concerned with their social and environmental impact – the fact that using and eating food efficiently is actually far cheaper than wasting it should allow us to look forward with a tentative optimism.

Tristram Stuart was canny about the timing of Feeding the 5000. By making it coincide with the most important climate change talks the world has ever seen Stuart has capitalised on the fact that, more and more, the international media seems willing to provide a platform for voices such as his. If that media can help to get the message across that, in addition to the myriad environmental and social benefits it will create, reducing food waste is an effective way to save money, then this wonderful stunt might just have succeeded.

All images courtesy of Jo Caird.

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