Towards the end of September I was invited in to the Independent to run a campaign on food waste.
Over the course of two days, I reported Denmark’s plan to sell food waste at a discount, Parliament’s inquiry into whether the UK should introduce food waste legislation and calls from the shadow environment secretary to get all UK councils to collect food waste.
We also looked at how introducing doggy bags reduced food waste in Scotland.
In today’s @Independent we visit the food waste campaigners feeding hungry schoolchildren in Leeds https://t.co/eW7thHop3K @fuelforschool pic.twitter.com/ezWFqjaVtF
— Far Nearer (@far_nearer) October 19, 2016
But the story that gained the most interest was about the UK’s first food waste supermarket, which has opened in Pudsey near Leeds. This was picked up by BBC R4, the One Show and Huffington Post.
When I started Far Nearer, I wanted to include local food economies among the projects I documented.
Since then, I’ve realised that talking about local food economies is much harder than it seems.
I’ve been using a framework suggested by Rachel Lawrence from the New Economics Foundation to think about local economies as people understanding that there is an economic opportunity that can be exploited, rather than some kind of social or environmental ideal.
The UK’s first food waste supermarket has opened, and you ‘pay as you feel’ https://t.co/eED8GzILNs pic.twitter.com/7LYfrS1hHf
— The Independent (@Independent) September 20, 2016
In the case of the Real Junk Food Project, which picks food thrown out by supermarkets and sells it on a pay-as-you-feel basis in cafes and stores, the economic opportunity that is being exploited is an accident of a broken system.
The government estimates that eight million tonnes of food is wasted post-manufacture in the UK. Research showed 60 per cent of this waste could be avoided, equivalent to £16 billion in food a year.
But without legislation to force supermarkets not to create so much waste, local initiatives are limited in what they can do.
On one hand there are organisations operating in the margins of the law, like the Real Junk Food Project, who are exploiting the broken system to feed those most in need.
Or there’s a more middle class solution: urban farms, community growing boxes and farmers markets that appeal to people with the money to shun the supermarket and the status quo. Perhaps these aren’t so much exploiting an economic opportunity when buyers could get this food cheaper if they went to a supermarket.
I worried that neither of these solutions really counted as an local economic solution to a national problem.
Then I had an inspiring coffee with Kate Swade from Shared Assets about land economies. She explained that it was no good asking if local farming makes economic sense when Tesco is massively subsidising products so that others can’t compete.
She said that people are divided between those who want to create a new system and those who want to work within the existing one – and that Shared Assets welcomes both approaches.
“We hold tight that we are consciously agnostic about the ‘right’ way to do things,” Kate said.
That means supporting small businesses as they battle the hostile environment of supermarket Britain to try and make good food accessible.
Because everyone wants to eat well, no matter how much money they have.
