Do YOU waste all of this food?

Of course you don't but just look at this:

A survey commissioned for Love Food Hate Waste suggests that British workers are shelling out £5.5bn on shop bought lunches each year, while they leave almost the same value of perfectly good lunch foods at home to go off.

Ham, bread, cheese, cold meats and other typical sandwich and lunchbox foods such as fruit, crisps and yogurts are forgotten and eventually binned, to the tune of £5.06bn every year**, while we buy sandwiches and take aways at lunchtime.

2.1 million tonnes of food fit for a packed lunch is heading to landfill each year, including:

• £821m worth of breads (530,000 tonnes)
• £94m worth of sliced meats (23,000 tonnes)

But the nation seems split on packed lunches. The research shows that nearly a third of workers (28%) say they never bring in lunch from home, while another third (33%) say they take lunch to work every working week day.

See: http://www.wrap.org.uk/wrap_corporate/news/buying_lunch_costs.html

In other words, there are some people who've got some bread, butter, lettuce, ham, cheese and so on in their cupboards and fridges. However, rather than spending just a few minutes a day putting something decent together with the food they have already spent their money on, they throw that away and then go to a shop that sells them something that will include good food together with seasonings and preservatives etc that they do not need.

Who are these people?

Read the rest of that article for more shocking stats on the food that we throw away. You will also see a link on that page to http://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com/ which is well worth a look even though it's a bit brown rice and sandals in parts. The message is clear. There are people in the world who think they have a right to grab some of our scarce resources and waste them. Some of these people are bleating now because they have fallen on hard times for a while and are looking for someone to help them out with cash and other things. As it says on the love food web site, if only you hadn't wasted all of that food, you could have saved yourself more than GBP300 a year.

On the other hand, as someone who lives alone I need to add that British supermarkets and other shops cater badly for singletons. So, loaves of bread can be too much and the last few slices can go furry before one gets the chance to eat them. In that case, let the birds and other wild life eat them, don't just put them in the bin.

Then again, though, how about the dabbawallas of Mubai: you'll never waste another meal again if you adopt that system. Find a video on that system by taking a look at www.economist/audiovideo/asia (I think you don't need a subscription to view that short video of how the dabbawalla system works). Every day 5,000 dabbawallas deliver 175,000 tiffin boxes to their respective destination with an error rate of just one in 6 million. That's one error every 34 days or around 10 errors a year during which a total of 63,875,000 tiffin boxes will have been delivered. Better than Six Sigma that!

DW