Leftovers...
I enjoyed speaking to Hilary Benn about food this morning. It would have been easy to use the interview to belittle the government's exhortation that we should eat our leftovers and stop throwing so much away.
I didn't go very far down that route however. One reason for that is that I didn't get the feeling that Mr Benn was responsible for highlighting the advice in the first place (and indeed, he conspicuously distanced himself from about it emanating from some briefing or other).
And anyway, the idea of reducing waste deserves more serious scrutiny than mere ridicule.
I suspect the real problem with the idea of cutting waste is how you disentangle that bit which is genuine waste, and that which is rational and efficient.
For example, I know that I sometimes buy more food than I need. That is not because I am stupid, but because the price of food is still quite low relative to my perception of the cost of running out of it and having to visit the shop specially to top up.
Other people must make - implicitly or explicitly - the same calculation.
I also suspect many people throw leftovers away because they want to vary their diet and not eat the same food for two days running. It costs more to do that, but it might be a price worth paying for variety.
It involves throwing food away, but is it waste? I don't know.
I doubt that it is any more damaging to the planet or the world's hungry than other ways of spending lots of money on food - such as eating too much of it, or eating expensive, resource-demanding items rather than simply eating porridge.
I'm and I'm one of the presenters of the 
Comment number 1.
At 8th Jul 2008, busby2 wrote:Evan
It sounds odd to me that the Govt is concerned about food waste at a time when they are concerned that as a nation we are getting too fat! After all there would be less food wasted if we didn't leave any food on our plates!And a lot of food that is thrown away is too little to do anything with. How often do people put left over food in the fridge only to forget about it and throw it away a couple of days later?
But the real problem that is simply hardly talked about is the huge growth of the population of the world. This is a given undisputed fact. Countries barely able or unable to feed themselves now have rapidly growing populations. Ethiopia's population, for example, is growing at aroud 3% per annum.
Global warming is a distraction. The number one problem of the world is population growth in the third world exceeding the ability of the world to sustain it. And for those who feel global warming is the real problem, they should see that population growth in the third world is destroyiing the planet by deforestation, erosion etc. Ethiopia's population is expected to grow to 150 million: how is this sustainable? The story is repeated throughout the Third World.
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Comment number 2.
At 8th Jul 2008, CarolineOfBrunswick wrote:Having leftovers or surplus food only requires some affluence, but dealing with them needs cookery skills and confidence to ingore use-by dates.
It feels like there is a big difference between having not enough or merely sufficient food, and having access to more than enough food. This means that I can entertain guests, make choices about what I'd like to eat and try new things. Food becomes a part of culture.
Commercially, food also becomes something that we buy independently of its consumption. Frequently food is bought before their existing purchases have been started, as also happens with books, music, clothes etc.
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Comment number 3.
At 9th Jul 2008, aliceabaco wrote:I'm quite horrified by your comments about wasting food. Yes, throwing leftovers away simply because you want to vary your diet IS waste. What are you doing with leftovers anyway? You must be buying too much, or preparing too much.
I supposed it angers me so much because I cannot afford to buy enough food. I was on a low income while I was unemployed, but now I am self-employed, it is even lower. I have a basic £49.15 a week to spend on food, gas, electricity, water, phone, not to mention clothes (charity shops, car boots)...If I get some work in, I increase that to £60, so my normal spend on food is about £20 a week. How do I manage? Without my allotment it would be very hard. At the moment, I have a lot of veg coming from my allotment, and even surpluses of lettuce and beans. I give them to friends who are delighted with them, and I would be very pissed off if they just chucked them in the bin. For the rest, I make do with muesli, omelettes, cheese rolls (I make my own bread). i can't afford proper meat, though I love it. I can tell I'm getting worse off because I used to be able to afford to buy Yeo Valley yogurt and I can't any more, nor can I afford orange juice (value packs of course). I also used to be able to afford to go swimming twice a week, and I can't afford that now either. If anyone has that much disrespect for food that they throw it away, they ought to be sent to India or somewhere and forced to explain themselves to those who are really short of it. All this talk of food prices going up - what's a tub of organic yogurt less compared with NO rice or NO maize?
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Comment number 4.
At 10th Jul 2008, Tamarin wrote:Comment 1 says it all, small planet too many humans, until that is addressed nothing will improve.
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