According to Lord Haskins, former chairman of Northern Foods, 50% of food that is produced in the UK ends up in landfill.
20% is thrown away by manufacturers before it gets anywhere near the shelves. The other 30%, he says, is thrown away by consumers.
The problem for manufacturers is that the retailers often give very short notice of orders which forces the manufacturers to make food in advance, guessing what they will order. Also, the retailers often have the right to cancel orders at the last minute, leaving the supplier with food that it can’t sell and has to dump.
This is very silly. If the retailers and their suppliers talked to each other a bit more and planned the flow of food onto the shelves, they could eliminate a lot of this ‘rubbish’.
As for the 30% thrown out by consumers, this figure is confirmed by WRAP (a pressure group that encourages efficient use of materials and recycling). They say that 2/3 is thrown away because the food is past its use by date and the other 1/3 because too much has been cooked.
I can’t help feeling that this behaviour is linked to increasing portion sizes and over-safe use-by dates when in fact the food would be perfectly OK to eat.
In view of the fact that 815 million people on the planet don’t have enough to eat (UN) and that wasted food production means wasted energy and extra methane gas from landfill (methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2), perhaps this problem needs some attention!
