A Broken Food System?

Yesterday we collected 20 boxes (2 car loads!) of unsold and surplus food items from a local supermarket and a little under 24 hours later I am feeling pleased (and relieved!) that, barring a few loaves of bread, we have nearly distributed the lot using the very excellent Olio platform  https://olioex.com/. Olio enables you to advertise items or request items locally for free with the focus being on reducing waste and helping to tackle the climate emergency. If, in the process you can obtain some food items that you would use for free (actually via Olio you can advertise and request non food items too, and they have recently branched out to include a selling platform too called "Olio Makes" aimed at home cooks and crafters etc) and if you can channel some perfectly edible food to others in need then that's an added bonus. The prime focus of this exercise is food waste reduction. This is an important thing to note and I will discuss the moral and ethical maze further below.

The shocking truth here is that the 20 boxes that we have successfully shifted would otherwise have been binned by the well known national supermarket in question. That chain (one of the big 4) has approximately 18 stores across Cornwall, a mix of large hypermarket stores, standard supermarket stores and local convenience style outlets. We collected from one of the larger hypermarket style outlets that they have here.

That the national chains of supermarkets have some wastage will not come as a surprise to many people. Any GCSE student of maths or science will tell you that no system can achieve 100% efficiency. This fact applies to all systems in all spheres of life. But nonetheless I find that I am shocked and moved to write about the food I am witnessing being potentially wasted in my local area. When I scale that up to a global level, a UK level or even just a Cornwall level it stops being comprehensible to me. Perhaps what really brought it home was the feeling of rising panic I felt within me when the store assistant wheeled out a warehouse trolley stacked with 10 boxes and then told us that there was another one like that on its way. It's a huge store and I know that our 20 boxes probably represents but a tiny fraction of a percentage of the food that routinely flows through that operation, but even so when you are standing there looking at how big 20 boxes are and how comparatively tiny your family estate car is it brings it home to you more than expressing it in terms of weight, volume or value.

So what was in the boxes? Predominantly this time it was fruit & veg and bakery items but in the past we have had quite a variety of other things (cut flowers, chocolates, air fresheners, cosmetics etc). I should explain that "use by" and "best before" dates are of real importance for food items. It is illegal in the UK to distribute food items which have gone beyond their "use by" dates but "best before" dates are advisory. So when we get our Olio collection (we do this weekly) one of our first tasks is to sort through the items and identify those with a "use by" date. These are the priority ones, because the clock is ticking and we have to distribute them before their use by date expires.If they haven't been distributed by then, we must dispose of them in other ways - in the case of fruit and veg items this typically means composting but some items aren't suitable for composting and sadly have to be thrown in the general waste. So in our 20 boxes we found about 20 stir fry veg packs and maybe a dozen shredded lettuce packs which were all use by the same day. We did successfully distribute some of these items but unfortunately not all so our compost bin was duly fed this morning. Added to these were other fruit and veg items which had "best before" dates - a large quantity of lettuces (I would guess 150), 77 boxes of fresh strawberries, some packs of fresh herbs, packs of spinach, bags of apples and packs of soft fruit. In addition to the fruit and veg was a large amount of bakery items - I would guess 50 loaves of sliced bread (of varying types) plus a selection of bread rolls.  In all yesterday we created 46 listings containing 390 separate food items.

When you are in the process of sorting the items, photographing and listing them and then monitoring and responding to the requests that come in it feels quite intense and frenetic, but also lots of fun. Some of our more experienced Olio requesters know the score and what to expect, but there are also people new to the platform who we have to explain things to. We work as a team to get through it;  but inevitably at times confusion reigns. We have learned that you have to be methodical about it. As the items get advertised on Olio people start requesting them and often an item will become over subscribed leaving us with the dilemma of who to allocate to (be nice to your Olio food heros folks!). We now have a steadily growing circle of Olio "regulars" and that is a key thing to nurture. This week we were pleased that volunteers from two local animal sanctuaries have discovered Olio (with a teeny bit of prompting from us on social media) and this was very helpful to us especially in enabling us to shift the large amounts of lettuce that we collected and we now know that turtles love strawberries. On a personal and local level its a fun process, we are meeting and connecting with lots of like minded people in our area and helping people out.

But as I reflect on this weeks' Olio "mission accomplished" I can't help but feel that all our efforts are, in a small and local way, merely treating some of the symptoms of a massive systemic problem with how food production and distribution works in the modern age. Maybe its even worse than that and we are unwittingly propping up a broken system by masking the problem, allowing the Supermarket bosses to claim some kind of kudos. Why do the sophisticated stock management systems of a major supermarket business not adjust and respond to consumer demand levels to avoid over supply on this scale? Is there some reputational imperative built in to ensure that shelves appear full even if that means higher waste levels are generated and hence presumably higher than necessary food prices? Consider the effort, resources and energy that goes in to production, packaging and distribution of the food items on our supermarkets' shelves and the environmental impact of that production. Within our boxes this week were strawberries from Spain, packs of basil from Morocco, rosemary flown in from South Africa (I find this one particularly bizarre as rosemary grows really well all year round in my garden in Cornwall). On an economic efficiency basis alone it can only be described as a monumental failure that supply is outstripping demand so significantly. 

And that's before we start thinking of the morals and ethics involved. In 2020, lots of people do not have enough to eat. Marcus Rashford has highlighted the challenges relating to school age children who cannot access hot meals during the school holidays and with many predicting significant economic hardship yet to come this problem will get probably worse. That we have prevented 20 boxes of edible food being thrown away is positive in environmental terms, but there are clearly challenges here. In a perfect world we wouldn't need to do this and food production would be in accordance with the needs of the population. We know that the people we distribute to in our area aren't necessarily always those in the most need and reaching those people is a perpetual challenge. By filling our neighbours' cupboards, freezers and fridges with free food items we are unquestionably helping them out so that is good. However also we have to recognise that this inevitably must have an impact locally on consumer demand for food items which doesn't do anything to help our struggling local independent high street businesses, whose trade the major supermarkets have already ravaged in the last 40 years.

So a lot to think about, mostly well above my pay grade. Meanwhile, like many Olio "food heroes" around the UK we will keep on keeping on, collecting and distributing as best we are able to. On balance it feels like the best response to the problem that we can muster and the many benefits of preventing food waste and in the process helping and connecting with others outweigh the challenges to my mind.