Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
More than 200 years ago, Malthus raised questions about what we should eat – and farm – and how our choices affect our fellow humans. Most people today remember him for being a prophet of doom and gloom, predicting that population growth would outstrip food production causing widespread famine. In fact, he encouraged a big political and ethical debate about food production.
Food waste is not a new subject. Philosophers, economists and even politicians have been discussing it for hundreds of years.
That’s right. It was discussed extensively in the classical world and, more recently, it became a hot topic in the 18th century. More than 200 years ago, in The Principle of Population, Malthus raised questions about what we should eat – and farm – and how our choices affect our fellow humans. Most people today remember him for being a prophet of doom and gloom, predicting that population growth would outstrip food production causing widespread famine.
In fact, by raising the question of whether food production leads to population growth or whether population growth drives us to find more efficient ways of producing food, he encouraged a big political debate about food efficiency. In terms of waste, he suggested that in some circumstances it was no bad thing. If you produce a surplus, you provide a buffer against times of shortage. You can even justify the luxury of wasting that surplus in times of plenty.
But today we live in a time of scarcity.
No, that’s the interesting thing. We perceive there’s a scarcity because millions starve and nearly a billion are malnourished. The reality is that there’s a grotesque imbalance: in the US, more food is fed to livestock than is eaten by humans. Globally we use about 1.2 billion tonnes of fodder to rear livestock. But the UN has calculated that if we fed food wastes to livestock instead, we would save enough to feed about three billion people – sufficient to continue feeding the world’s growing population until 2050.
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In his first book, campaigner, and historian Tristram Stuart looked into the rise of politically motivated vegetarianism in the 18th century. His second, Waste, is an urgent call to action. Nearly one billion people in the world go hungry every day while in North America and Europe, our farmers, manufacturers, supermarkets, and consumers discard between 30 and 50 per cent of our food supplies – enough to feed the world’s hungry more than three times over. As a result, freegans like Stuart are able to live on what is thrown away by our supermarkets. He’ll only stop taking food out of supermarket bins, he’s pledged, when they cease to throw good food away.
