Speak boldly Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall!
From BBC News Magazine
Viewpoint: The rejected vegetables that aren’t even wonky
There is little doubt this situation is just as bad in the US and around the world. Yet the big food companies (not food producers) tell us we’ll all starve if we don’t buy their products to produce more food. It’s a pack of lies. We waste far too much food. What we have is a distribution problem and in the first world countries we have so much food that we are incredibly picky.
Food waste is a subject i feel is important – as a cattle rancher and mom, i hear a lot of people complain (in the US) about the high cost of food, yet most producers (meats, eggs, chicken, vegetables, fruit) barely scrape out a living. The facts are that the cost of production continues to skyrocket, yet, by and large, the producer’s income has remained stagnant while the consumer’s cost has risen only a little. The margins are very thin and oftentimes only the much aligned farm subsidies provided by the govt are the difference between going another year and losing the farm. We could utilise our resources much more efficiently and produce a great deal more foodstuffs. But there is no reason to do so. Food is so cheap, we would simply lose money.
That huge pile of parsnips that Mr Fearnly-Whittingstall is standing in front of could consumed by cattle or sheep or just returned to the soil to be ploughed back in, but will it? For sure, the food you throw into your bin at home will go only to the landfill.
Okay, i’ll step off my soapbox now! 😉
Cheers!
tauna
“All the comments to the article are spot on and i can add nothing to them. I thought most people already knew this stuff, but apparently not if the article is accurate in stating the 40% of our food produced goes to waste. Then again, I have personally seen family members throw out a bowl of perfectly good fruit simply because one item had a soft spot on it! I had to choke back my admonition!”