What gets eaten, what gets thrown away

An interesting article caught my eye in today's Gazeta Wyborcza: what foods Poles tend to throw away, compared what their British counterparts discard. The graph is here (if you can't read Polish, the graphics are clear enough if viewed in conjunction with this post). The full article is here.

Although the graph looks convincing, it is actually comparing apples and pears (percentage of Poles saying which category of foodstuff they throw away compared to actual tonnage of food Brits throw away, broken down by category), the ranking is most thought provoking.

Nearly half of Poles claim to throw away more bread than any other sort of food disposed of - surprising, given the fact that bread has an almost holy status in Poland (much like rice does in China). In the UK, bread comes third (after vegetables and fruit). Indeed, Brits throw away nearly twice as much vegetable as they do bread.

Discussing this with Moni this morning, we agreed as to why this should be. Polish bread - which is wonderfully tasty, nourishing and generally fabulous - has an 'best by' date measured in hours. Because taste is all-important, flour-enhancers are not used, and so Polish bread goes stale very, very quickly. In Britain however, Mother's Pride, Sunblest and other white-sliced is so stuffed with chemicals that it will last a week and still be OK to smear Robertson's jam over (35% fruit content).

The massive amounts of fruit and veg that Brits chuck out can be put down to the semi-effectiveness of the 'five a day' campaign that the UK government has been promoting for years, getting the average citizen to increase his or her intake of fresh fruit and vegetables. Brits will buy (often out of guilt rather than conviction) large amounts of the stuff, but will then not be bothered to actually peel, squeeze, cut or otherwise prepare it and then eat it. (Am I right?) And so vegetables and fruit become number one and two food products that are wasted. Poles, I think on the whole have a healthier attitude to both money and food, so less gets binned (food accounts for a higher percentage of outgoings in Poland than in the UK).

Brits, says this article, throw away a billion tomatoes a year. Can that be right? That works out at 15 - 16 a year for every man, woman and child in the UK... one tomato every three weeks? Sounds about right... A billion boiled down, and it's not so scandalous. What is, however, is the fact that 39% of food that gets wasted does so at the point of production (crops rotting in the fields, unpicked), and another 19% in transit to the point of purchase.

In these constrained times - should we buy less and consume less? Or does buying more food than we need actually support jobs and businesses from field to table? Wasting food may be ethically wrong, but in economic terms...? Please feel free to discuss!

This time three years ago:
Białystok, rush hour