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TED _ Technology, Entertainment, Design

Talk: Tristram Stuart: The global food waste scandal

(from: http://www.ted.com/talks/tristram_stuart_the_global_food_waste_scandal.html)

California Language Lab, [email protected]

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0:17

The job of uncovering the global foodwaste scandal started for me when I was15 years old. I bought some pigs. I wasliving in Sussex. And I started to feedthem in the most traditional andenvironmentally friendly way. I went to myschool kitchen, and I said, "Give me thescraps that my school friends have turnedtheir noses up at." I went to the localbaker and took their stale bread. I went tothe local greengrocer, and I went to afarmer who was throwing away potatoesbecause they were the wrong shape orsize for supermarkets. This was great. Mypigs turned that food waste into deliciouspork. I sold that pork to my school friends'parents, and I made a good pocketmoney addition to my teenage allowance.

But I noticed that most of the food that Iwas giving my pigs was in fact fit forhuman consumption, and that I was onlyscratching the surface, and that right theway up the food supply chain, in

supermarkets, greengrocers, bakers, inour homes, in factories and farms, wewere hemorrhaging out food.Supermarkets didn't even want to talk tome about how much food they werewasting. I'd been round the back. I'd seenbins full of food being locked and thentrucked off to landfill sites, and I thought,surely there is something more sensibleto do with food than waste it.

1:27One morning, when I was feeding mypigs, I noticed a particularly tasty-lookingsun-dried tomato loaf that used to crop upfrom time to time. I grabbed hold of it, satdown, and ate my breakfast with my pigs.(Laughter) That was the first act of what Ilater learned to call freeganism, really anexhibition of the injustice of food waste,and the provision of the solution to foodwaste, which is simply to sit down and eatfood, rather than throwing it away. Thatbecame, as it were, a way of confrontinglarge businesses in the business of

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wasting food, and exposing, mostimportantly, to the public, that when we'retalking about food being thrown away,we're not talking about rotten stuff, we'renot talking about stuff that's beyond thepale. We're talking about good, fresh foodthat is being wasted on a colossal scale.

2:17Eventually, I set about writing my book,really to demonstrate the extent of thisproblem on a global scale. What thisshows is a nation-by-nation breakdown ofthe likely level of food waste in eachcountry in the world. Unfortunately,empirical data, good, hard stats, don'texist, and therefore to prove my point, Ifirst of all had to find some proxy way ofuncovering how much food was beingwasted. So I took the food supply of everysingle country and I compared it to whatwas actually likely to be being consumedin each country. That's based on dietintake surveys, it's based on levels ofobesity, it's based on a range of factorsthat gives you an approximate guess asto how much food is actually going intopeople's mouths. That black line in themiddle of that table is the likely level ofconsumption with an allowance for certainlevels of inevitable waste. There willalways be waste. I'm not that unrealisticthat I think we can live in a waste-freeworld. But that black line shows what afood supply should be in a country if theyallow for a good, stable, secure,nutritional diet for every person in thatcountry. Any dot above that line, andyou'll quickly notice that that includesmost countries in the world, representsunnecessary surplus, and is likely toreflect levels of waste in each country.

As a country gets richer, it invests moreand more in getting more and moresurplus into its shops and restaurants,and as you can see, most European andNorth American countries fall between150 and 200 percent of the nutritionalrequirements of their populations. So acountry like America has twice as muchfood on its shop shelves and in itsrestaurants than is actually required tofeed the American people.

4:03But the thing that really struck me, when Iplotted all this data — and it was a lot ofnumbers — was that you can see how itlevels off. Countries rapidly shoot towardsthat 150 mark, and then they level off, andthey don't really go on rising as you mightexpect. So I decided to unpack that data alittle bit further to see if that was true orfalse. And that's what I came up with. Ifyou include not just the food that ends upin shops and restaurants, but also thefood that people feed to livestock, themaize, the soy, the wheat, that humanscould eat but choose to fatten livestockinstead to produce increasing amounts ofmeat and dairy products, what you find isthat most rich countries have betweenthree and four times the amount of foodthat their population needs to feed itself. Acountry like America has four times theamount of food that it needs.

4:55When people talk about the need toincrease global food production to feedthose nine billion people that areexpected on the planet by 2050, I alwaysthink of these graphs. The fact is, wehave an enormous buffer in rich countriesbetween ourselves and hunger. We've






never had such gargantuan surplusesbefore. In many ways, this is a greatsuccess story of human civilization, of theagricultural surpluses that we set out toachieve 12,000 years ago. It is a successstory. It has been a success story. Butwhat we have to recognize now is that weare reaching the ecological limits that ourplanet can bear, and when we chop downforests, as we are every day, to growmore and more food, when we extractwater from depleting water reserves,when we emit fossil fuel emissions in thequest to grow more and more food, andthen we throw away so much of it, wehave to think about what we can startsaving.

And yesterday, I went to one of the localsupermarkets that I often visit to inspect, ifyou like, what they're throwing away. Ifound quite a few packets of biscuitsamongst all the fruit and vegetables andeverything else that was in there. And Ithought, well this could serve as a symbolfor today.

6:13

So I want you to imagine that these ninebiscuits that I found in the bin representthe global food supply, okay? We start outwith nine. That's what's in fields aroundthe world every single year. The firstbiscuit we're going to lose before we evenleave the farm. That's a problem primarilyassociated with developing workagriculture, whether it's a lack ofinfrastructure, refrigeration,pasteurization, grain stores, even basicfruit crates, which means that food goesto waste before it even leaves the fields.The next three biscuits are the foods thatwe decide to feed to livestock, the maize,

the wheat and the soya. Unfortunately,our beasts are inefficient animals, andthey turn two-thirds of that into feces andheat, so we've lost those two, and we'veonly kept this one in meat and dairyproducts. Two more we're going to throwaway directly into bins. This is what mostof us think of when we think of foodwaste, what ends up in the garbage, whatends up in supermarket bins, what endsup in restaurant bins. We've lost anothertwo, and we've left ourselves with just fourbiscuits to feed on. That is not asuperlatively efficient use of globalresources, especially when you think ofthe billion hungry people that exist alreadyin the world.

Having gone through the data, I thenneeded to demonstrate where that foodends up. Where does it end up? We'reused to seeing the stuff on our plates, butwhat about all the stuff that goes missingin between?

Supermarkets are an easy place to start.This is the result of my hobby, which isunofficial bin inspections. (Laughter)Strange you might think, but if we couldrely on corporations to tell us what theywere doing in the back of their stores, wewouldn't need to go sneaking around theback, opening up bins and having a lookat what's inside. But this is what you cansee more or less on every street corner inBritain, in Europe, in North America. Itrepresents a colossal waste of food, butwhat I discovered whilst I was writing mybook was that this very evidentabundance of waste was actually the tipof the iceberg. When you start going upthe supply chain, you find where the real






food waste is happening on a gargantuanscale.

8:23Can I have a show of hands if you have aloaf of sliced bread in your house? Wholives in a household where that crust --that slice at the first and last end of eachloaf -- who lives in a household where itdoes get eaten? Okay, most people, noteveryone, but most people, and this is,I'm glad to say, what I see across theworld, and yet has anyone seen asupermarket or sandwich shop anywherein the world that serves sandwiches withcrusts on it? (Laughter) I certainly haven't.So I kept on thinking, where do thosecrusts go? (Laughter) This is the answer,unfortunately: 13,000 slices of fresh breadcoming out of this one single factory everysingle day, day-fresh bread. In the sameyear that I visited this factory, I went toPakistan, where people in 2008 weregoing hungry as a result of a squeeze onglobal food supplies. We contribute to thatsqueeze by depositing food in bins here inBritain and elsewhere in the world. Wetake food off the market shelves thathungry people depend on.

Go one step up, and you get to farmers,who throw away sometimes a third oreven more of their harvest because ofcosmetic standards. This farmer, forexample, has invested 16,000 pounds ingrowing spinach, not one leaf of which heharvested, because there was a little bit ofgrass growing in amongst it. Potatoes thatare cosmetically imperfect, all going forpigs. Parsnips that are too small forsupermarket specifications, tomatoes inTenerife, oranges in Florida, bananas inEcuador, where I visited last year, all

being discarded. This is one day's wastefrom one banana plantation in Ecuador.All being discarded, perfectly edible,because they're the wrong shape or size.

10:06

If we do that to fruit and vegetables, youbet we can do it to animals too. Liver,lungs, heads, tails, kidneys, testicles, allof these things which are traditional,delicious and nutritious parts of ourgastronomy go to waste. Offalconsumption has halved in Britain andAmerica in the last 30 years. As a result,this stuff gets fed to dogs at best, or isincinerated. This man, in Kashgar,Xinjiang province, in Western China, isserving up his national dish. It's calledsheep's organs. It's delicious, it'snutritious, and as I learned when I went toKashgar, it symbolizes their taboo againstfood waste. I was sitting in a roadsidecafe. A chef came to talk to me, I finishedmy bowl, and halfway through theconversation, he stopped talking and hestarted frowning into my bowl. I thought,"My goodness, what taboo have I broken?How have I insulted my host?" He pointedat three grains of rice at the bottom of mybowl, and he said, "Clean." (Laughter) Ithought, "My God, you know, I go aroundthe world telling people to stop wastingfood. This guy has thrashed me at myown game." (Laughter)

But it gave me faith. It gave me faith thatwe, the people, do have the power to stopthis tragic waste of resources if we regardit as socially unacceptable to waste foodon a colossal scale, if we make noiseabout it, tell corporations about it, tellgovernments we want to see an end to






food waste, we do have the power tobring about that change.

11:30Fish, 40 to 60 percent of European fishare discarded at sea, they don't even getlanded. In our homes, we've lost touchwith food. This is an experiment I did onthree lettuces. Who keeps lettuces in theirfridge? Most people. The one on the leftwas kept in a fridge for 10 days. The onein the middle, on my kitchen table. Notmuch difference. The one on the right Itreated like cut flowers. It's a livingorganism, cut the slice off, stuck it in avase of water, it was all right for anothertwo weeks after this.

Some food waste, as I said at thebeginning, will inevitably arise, so thequestion is, what is the best thing to dowith it? I answered that question when Iwas 15. In fact, humans answered thatquestion 6,000 years ago: Wedomesticated pigs to turn food waste backinto food. And yet, in Europe, that practicehas become illegal since 2001 as a resultof the foot-and-mouth outbreak. It'sunscientific. It's unnecessary. If you cookfood for pigs, just as if you cook food forhumans, it is rendered safe. It's also amassive saving of resources. At themoment, Europe depends on importingmillions of tons of soy from SouthAmerica, where its production contributesto global warming, to deforestation, tobiodiversity loss, to feed livestock here inEurope. At the same time we throw awaymillions of tons of food waste which wecould and should be feeding them. If wedid that, and fed it to pigs, we would savethat amount of carbon. If we feed our foodwaste which is the current government

favorite way of getting rid of food waste,to anaerobic digestion, which turns foodwaste into gas to produce electricity, yousave a paltry 448 kilograms of carbondioxide per ton of food waste. It's muchbetter to feed it to pigs. We knew thatduring the war. (Laughter)

13:20A silver lining: It has kicked off globally,the quest to tackle food waste. Feedingthe 5,000 is an event I first organized in2009. We fed 5,000 people all on foodthat otherwise would have been wasted.Since then, it's happened again inLondon, it's happening internationally,and across the country. It's a way oforganizations coming together tocelebrate food, to say the best thing to dowith food is to eat and enjoy it, and to stopwasting it. For the sake of the planet welive on, for the sake of our children, for thesake of all the other organisms that shareour planet with us, we are a terrestrialanimal, and we depend on our land forfood. At the moment, we are trashing ourland to grow food that no one eats. Stopwasting food.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)


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