Capitalism has embraced to speak the language of food, costing food in the entire world
It is a problem for me the fact that by thinking about food this way, we make value judgments based on who the people who eat these “alternative” food are most likely to be. People who enjoy sharing their food can be described as “green lefties,” whereas those who receive food at local pantries or communal kitchens may be “vulnerable” or “in poverty.” The development of a new language that which food is discussed will allow for an improved, healthy, enjoyable, and long-lasting connection with the food accessible to everyone, no matter who we are.
Surplus food
Consider food surpluses, which is an ideal illustration of a food item that has value judgments along with it. Food surplus is food item that was meant for the supermarket and for other reasons, but due to a myriad of reasons isn’t being exchanged commercially.
A recent incident at an industrial chicken plant located in the West Midlands provides a good illustration. This Two Sisters facility was shut down because of poor hygiene and improper labeling procedures, but however, the reason was not that the product it was fed before it was delivered to it, was innately poor.
The frightened chickens were discarded in thousands as the plant was briefly shut down due to the fact that the chicken’s meat was moving through the beginning stage of the chain (growing at farms or then being killed in slaughterhouses) but was unable to be transported to the facility where it’s labeled, packaged and delivered to the supermarkets. If the producer was in a position to transfer chickens swiftly to a discounter or charity who could take the chickens, pack and distribute the chicken’s meat, it wouldn’t be wasted, but it was not possible to find any at the time.
Other reasons that lead to excess include packaging issues or over-supply resulting from favorable growth conditions, sudden changes in the market, such as when an opponent offers a cheap price on a product or food item is unusually shaped (“wonky”) or shaped in a strange way and is considered unsellable by the supermarkets.
If the food is saved from the chaos in the market, it may be offered in some cases to discounted retailers. They sell the excess at a cheaper price than the normal price and are among the most rapidly growing sectors within the UK. Sometimes the food gets transformed into animal feed, or is recycled, or is turned to biofuel.
In the majority of cases, surplus food is given to charities like FareShare, Community Shop, City Harvest, Food Cycle, Real Junk Food Projects as well as other organizations in the UK as well as other countries. Donated surplus is given to those who consume it through cafés, community pantries, social eating, cooking lessons and similar activities and indirectly through third sector and charities organisations that then feed the hungry in a variety of ways, but usually and not just as food emergency sources (foodbanks).
Food sharing meal prepared using leftover food from Sheffield University. University of Sheffield, 2015. Megan Blake, Author provided
We don’t know how much food that would otherwise be wasted is saved and donated. To give you an idea, in 2017, FareShare provided the equivalent to 28.6m meal items to more than 7,000 organizations. Additionally, food items from the Community Shop network served nearly 4 million meals across its four stores as well and City Harvest delivered about 1m meals to businesses based in London. Yet, these figures suggest that a lot more could be saved. Wrap, the leading UK agency for recycling, estimates that more than 2 million tons of food are wasted each year in the UK business sector (one ton equals approximately 2,380 meals), and a large portion of it could have been consumed.
