| I REMEMBER once hearing a fridge defined as “a place where you store your food before throwing it away”.
A report earlier this month shows this definition to be true.
The Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) has produced research suggesting that people in the UK needlessly throw away 6.7 million tonnes of food each year. Now, no one I know has enough money; desperate times and all that. But, apparently, everyone has got enough food to throw away — untouched — about a fifth of their stockpile.
A mum on the radio explained the problem: “The trouble is, you go into the supermarket to buy some milk, but the milk is always put at the far end; so you get all this other stuff in your face first — and the cakes look so good, you have to pop one or two in the basket.” This is true. How often I heard the following, when I worked in a supermarket. As I packed the customer’s fifth bag they would say: “And I only came in for some milk!” My record was serving a customer who “only came in for some milk, and spent £73.
We are clearly buying too much, as the UK statistics show. And how about this? Every household in the UK throws away about 18 per cent of its food; and those with children, 27 per cent. And what are we throwing away in particular? Well, 5500 whole chickens get the old heave-ho every day, followed closely by 440,000 ready meals — again, daily. (No, I can hardly believe it either.)
Bread and potatoes were the two foods most commonly thrown away when they could very well be eaten. And spare a thought for the tragic yogurt. The yogurt is the single most abandoned item in these parts, with 1.3 million unopened cartons going the way of the bin every 24 hours. So, that is more than two million pointlessly killed chickens a year, and more than 60 million yogurts joining everything else on our ballooning landfill sites.
The Environment Minister said that the findings were “staggering”. He added: “There are climate costs to all of us in growing, processing, packaging, transporting, and refrigerating the food we throw away.”
We need the prophets of old to induce some much-needed shelf-reflection. Let Jeremiah weep for the prematurely exiled ready meals. Let Hosea long for the restoration of the perfectly edible potatoes. Amos shall denounce the basket of summer fruit thrown casually away; and Malachi proclaim the great day of the yogurt. Let Ezekiel envision the new supermarket, where milk is not always put at the far end. And by the landfill site, choking with methane gas, let us hear again the writer of Lamentations:
“Is it nothing to you, you who pass by?”
Until the new-food dawn, even our most famous of prayers may need an extra line: “Give us today our daily bread — that we might throw most of it away.”
www.simonparke.com
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