At the Penguin Press ‘launch lunch’ I talked about a book called Waste, by Tristram Stuart, which we're publishing in July. It's about food waste. We throw away up to 20 million tonnes of food in the UK 
every year, and that amount is matched by some other European countries, Japan, and the US. If there was a way of redistributing the excess it would feed 1 billion of the world's hungry three times over. Food is wasted all along the supply chain. Farmers overproduce because they know as much as a quarter of their crop may be rejected for aesthetic reasons – if a potato is too knobbly or a carrot too wonky it will be thrown away. In the supermarket, because of unnecessarily strict food safety guidelines and sell-by dates that again are there for aesthetic reasons, food is thrown out weeks before it would be unsafe to eat. And finally, in the home, we buy too much food and don't eat it all. If we wasted less, global food prices could stabilise, thereby allowing the hungry to afford more, and because there would be less demand in the rich West, the countries that export food to us at their population's expense would sell it where it was needed. Pollution would be drastically reduced – there would be fewer cows emitting methane and fewer fuel-guzzling machines transporting and processing food.
The author lives by example. As a student he fed himself on what food shops and supermarkets threw away. He is a Freegan. To this day, as well as the pigs he rears and his vegetable patch, he lives largely on what is discarded by others. Now I have always wanted to go bin-dipping, and when I mentioned this to my colleague, Emily Hill, she confessed that she did too, so on a Sunday afternoon in April we went looking for our dinner in bins around the Strand and Covent Garden.
***
The first supermarket we came to had closed a few minutes before we arrived, and there was no sign of food being wasted front of house, but when we went around the back we saw a man unloading several green pallets into a green skip. The pallets were full of food that had reached its sell-by date but was fit to eat. When we asked if he minded us taking pictures he was delighted. He had complained to his manager about the amount wasted every day but was told there was nothing they could do about it. Not only was this food fated to expend its nutrients in an incinerator or pit, it was sprayed with blue dye to prevent the food being sold on, a slightly less offensive deterrent than bleach, which some supermarkets use to put 
off scavengers.
The second supermarket, within walking distance of the first, was more careful about who it let look at its bins. We came to locked doors and a warning sign that rhymed: 
‘This door will not open before 8AM, unless it is the dustbin men.’ We moved on to a doughnut shop. A black bag nestled innocuously by its doorstep. It was heavy. I opened it and found a buffet of multicoloured, icing-smeared, cream-filled unhealthy snacks. They had been put in the bag an hour earlier, when they would have been fine to eat, and now were soiled by cup dregs and damp tissues.
Our last two stops were coffee shops. One we passed as it was closing, saw the fridge shelves stacked with ready-to-eat sandwiches and resolved to come back to find out what was being done with them. The other we were drawn to by the small hill of transparent bin bags outside it. The first, we discovered, did 
not throw its sandwiches away, but saved them till the next day – a guiding star of frugality in a sea of commercial effluent. But the see-through bin bags of the second were full of sticky Danish pastries, soggy bread pitted with dried fruits, and croissants.
We went home hungry, but not because there wasn’t enough to eat.
Phillip Birch
Assistant Editor, Penguin Press
Emily Hill
Publishing Co-ordinator, Penguin Press
Recent Comments