Tristram Stuart: The Beauty of Ugly Food

Good morning. I hope it's all right to start with a bit of controversy that we need to double food production by 2050 to feed the expected nine billion people on the planet. This is part of the productionist ideology that has driven the agricultural frontier into the world's remaining forests. I dispute that we need to double food production. Indeed, we have to ask ourselves the question, are we capable of it? Yeah, I believe we are, but at what cost would that happen? At the moment, the main way in which we are increasing production globally, is to extend the agricultural frontier, and we have to remember that food production by taking over habitats and turning it into our fields is the single biggest environmental impact that humans have had on the planet. Does that mean we should stop growing food? No. Does it mean we have to grow food in more sensitive ways and use that food that we do grow for what it is which is embedded land, embedded water, embedded emissions, embedded love and care. If we take that attitude, we don't need to double food production by 2050 'cause we already grow enough food on this planet to feed 12 billion. We need to use it more carefully and waste less of it.

Green beans, they've come to symbolize for me some of the stupidities in the global food system, but also some of the great opportunities that actually exist and how easy it is to tackle them. I started my food waste campaign actually back when I was 15. I was collecting food waste from my school kitchens, collecting these big yellow buckets of swill, all the stuff that my school friends had turned their noses up at, and I fed them to my pigs. I went to the local baker, and green grocer and markets, and also to a farmer who was throwing away potatoes that were wrong shape or size for the supermarkets. That was great. My pigs loved it. They squealed every time I came back from school with these yellow buckets. It was a very happy time. My dad was growing vegetables, and I had chickens. I swapped manure for his offcuts from the vegetables in his garden, and it was a great system. But most of the food that I was collecting was fit for human consumption, and I knew I was just scraping the surface.

I went on to start eating a lot of this food myself, good fresh food out of dumpsters round the back of the supermarkets. I talked to those supermarkets about the food they were putting in bins, and couldn't they give it to homeless charities? Couldn't they sell it to their customers for half price? Even give it away for free, do anything but lock it in bins and send it off to landfill sites. They didn't want to talk to me at that time. So I started taking things into my own hands, taking them home and eating that stuff. I did it as a way of demonstrating that if someone like me who can perfectly well afford to buy food can live off dumpsters, something was very wrong with the system. I started taking journalists, TV cameras round the back of supermarkets showing them the sheer quantity of food being put in there, and that a lot of it was still within its date. Those dates themselves were suspect. So that really kicked off an awareness-raising campaign. We got a lot of press for that, and it started this dialogue first of all in the United Kingdom, and then increasingly in other countries.

I eventually got round to writing my second book which was The Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, and I realized when I and went and did the global research, I went around the world, I went up and down the supply chain, that actually that stuff from the back of the dumpsters, that was the tip of the iceberg. And, in fact, most of the food waste that is occurring was further up in the supply chain, and principally on farms.

So when in 2013 we were invited by the United Nations Environment Program to bring our positive win-win solution promoting campaigns to Kenya, our challenge was to feed the 500 environment ministers and U.N. delegates in Nairobi with food waste sourced in Kenya. Now you think, Wow, there are millions of hungry people in that country. Surely, they're not wasting food like we are in the rest of the world. Sadly, we found that they are. Not because of neglect or because they don't care, but because of first of all infrastructure and the lack of it on small holder farms, and secondly, and this is where the beans come in, the buying practices of European supermarkets who source their horticultural products from those countries. It's a boom industry, and a lot of people are making a lot of money in good ways growing good food.

I'm going to bring your attention to the word trimmed in this photograph. You will notice, if anyone who has grown beans, that these beans have been trimmed not where they taper at the end where they're getting a bit thinner, but right in the middle of the bean. That's because beans grow in lots of different lengths, and yet this plastic carton is one length. To get them into these plastic cartons, they're trimming the beans off, sometimes 30 percent of the bean off. I visited farmers who were wasting 30 to 40 percent of the food they grow. That's 30 to 40 percent of the land and the water used to grow that food in a country where people are going without land, shifting their agriculture further up into the mountains, chopping down more trees, causing interruptions of the hydrological cycle. I visited depots exporting beans to Europe who were wasting 20 tons a day at least of good fresh food. All of that I would have been very proud to grow on my own allotment, but they're wasting it, and the contractors who come and collect this waste to feed to cattle have to sign a contract saying that they won't feed any of this food to people. That's a crime. We took this evidence to some of the supermarkets who were implicated in this supply chain, and we showed them what we had seen. They undertook to change their policies over that night. They knew how embarrassing it was going to be if this kind of thing got to their consumers.

We'd also talked to the supermarkets about the bananas they were going to waste. Again, cosmetic standards. Bananas, when you go into a shop they're all in perfect bunches, they're all the same size, they've all got exactly the same curvature. They're the same diameter. Bananas don't grow like that. In order to achieve that uniformity, all the ones that don't comply get discarded. This is the waste of one banana plantation after one day of harvest in Ecuador. Bananas being wasted in Costa Rica. When I first visited a carrot production unit in England, I remember going into the yard and seeing this great big bin, a little bit like this one, full of carrots. I said, “Oh, these must be your premium carrots going to the supermarkets.”

“No, these are the waste ones.”

“Why? What's wrong with these carrots? They're better than any carrots I've ever grown.” He held it up to the light, and he said, “You can see there's a slight curvature there, and the supermarket we're supplying doesn't allow that. They have to be perfectly straight.” These ones, you can see, are perfectly straight, but they're too long to fit into the containers, and they're being discarded. The very best fate that some of these carrots get is to be fed to livestock. That's a sub-optimal use of resources to put it mildly.

Go one step down the supply chain to the manufacturers. When you buy that loaf of sliced bread, I want a show of hands who lives in a household where somebody eats the first and last slice of the loaf? Most people. But when you go to a supermarket or Pret a Manger, or one of the other shops that provide you with these sandwiches that are ready-made and very often delicious, saves you a lot of hassle. I mean, making a sandwich is pretty tricky to do at home, right? Okay, have you ever seen one of those sandwiches with a crust on it? So, I kept on thinking what happens to all these crusts? Surely, they turn them into bread crumbs or some other thing. We've come up with loads of different ways of using odds and ends of bread, and in our traditional cuisines. Do you eat bread and butter pudding in the States? We have a lovely dessert with raisins and cream. Anyway, there's lots of things you can do with this bread so I assumed the industrial, efficient production systems had come up with something. Unfortunately, I found that wasn't the case. 13,000 slices of fresh bread being discarded from a single factory every day. Multiply that out to all the other sandwich factories that exist in the world. 17 percent of every loaf going into this factory was being lost, 17 percent of the fields growing that wheat. You may as well pick them up into space and chuck them away 'cause that's what we're doing when we chuck away this food. So we set about campaigning about this.

First of all, I wrote my book, and that exposed the global figures. I knew that 350 pages of densely-argued, data-rich book was only going to reach a certain sector of the population, an important sector, the ones making decisions, but I knew I had to take this message to the millions, high-profile, public-facing campaigns. I'd always fed myself out of waste. I thought, “What would it be like to feed 5,000 people out of waste? What would it be like to bring together all the organizations who have come up with solutions to this problem whether it's redistribution organizations, campaigning organizations, people who like ugly fruit and vegetables, bring them all together, have a massive festival, get loads of press attention, get this into the press.” That is going to change the minds of the CEOs who make decisions about what ugly fruit and vegetables should look like. Since then, we've come up with a lot of great formats.

Disco Soup was something we first tried in 2012 in Paris at our Feeding The 5,000 Event, and we had 2,000 people in front of the Hotel de Ville dancing in the rain whilst chopping all these ugly fruit and vegetables and turning them into fruit salad and salad. It got a lot of attention, and Disco Soup since then has become a format that's spread around the world. I'll give you a taste of what it feels like to be at one of our events.

(Event's host): Ladies and gentlemen, Big Ben is sounding 12 o'clock. Welcome to Feeding The 5,000! Well, Feeding The 5,000 is about a really good partnership between a number of organizations to really try and raise awareness of the issue of food waste both from retailers, from consumers, from a whole range of people.

(Event's host): We want to feed 5,000 people, but we also want to feed you with food that would otherwise be wasted. The food that you're being offered today is stuff that goes into landfills. It's perfectly acceptable. It's good grub, but what we have got is we've got stuff that the supermarkets say no to, and consumers say no to.

In this country, we waste so much surplus, fit-for-consumption food, and it should be going to people.

With our population increase, we're getting to the point that food waste, it's ridiculous especially in the U.K. Yeah, hopefully things like this will raise awareness and stop food waste in the future. Friends of the Earth are here to demonstrate how much food that can't be used for humans, can be used for animals.

So we've got some live pigs that we're actually feeding the waste from apple pressing today. The visitors here today are going to drink the apple juice, and then the pressed apples are actually being fed to our pigs as well. So it there to demonstrate a much more efficient way of using food so it doesn't go to waste.

60 million tons of food waste are being thrown away every year. For the average family, they could save 50 pounds a month simply by making the most with the food they buy.

(Event's host): The vegetables that are being used for lunch are mulch, all right? 'Cause basically there are issues, but they are fresh and very tasty. All these carrots are not suitable for supermarkets, wrong size, wrong shape. So just highlighting the unnecessary waste of food here today. Getting people to help bag stuff up, and then we can deliver it off to charities.

I've being a freegan for 30 years. Such a crazy world that we live in at the moment with so much food wasted, and so much starvation in the other parts of the planet. We need to all respond to this by saying, “Look, the global food waste scandal whereby we waste a third of the entire world's food supply is something that we can solve. It's causing environmental destruction. It's contributing to global hunger, but the solutions are delicious, and that involves eating and enjoying food rather than throwing it away.”

Thank you. They're great fun and, moreover, they get a lot of press. That is what puts pressure on the companies and the governments who can change the policies regarding food waste. One of the lessons that I learned when I studied what was happening with regard to food waste in America, is you have gleaning networks. You have volunteers actually going to these farms, collecting some of this reject produce and getting it to hungry people. No one was doing it in Europe so instead of promoting another organization's activities, we set it up ourself. Since then, it's been replicated in other European countries, and we've been commissioned by the European Commission to take it to other countries. It's a great way also of getting the message out about the causes of this food waste, and what we can do to tackle it.

I am really keen to bring Feeding The 5,000 to the United States. We're in conversations with a number of different organizations who want to tell us what the priorities here should be. Portion sizes are one of them. Portion sizes in the United States are shocking. This is some global data I generated when I wrote my book. What it shows is the food supply that is actually available to every population in every country in the world. Essentially, to cut a long story short, it shows that in America there are twice as many calories available to eat as is actually required. That obviously is a public health disaster. It's an environmental disaster, and it's a huge opportunity 'cause if we can bring that down, we can bring down the food footprint of the United States. We can bring down the problems of obesity, and we can bring down the environmental impact of food production simply by avoiding producing, selling, eating too much food. It's good for everyone. It saves money. It saves the planet. I think that we can stop wasting so much food, and it's going to be tasty. Thank you very much.