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Tonnes of food never reaches the consumers

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Photo: Wikimedia commons.

Food worth billions of Swedish crowns is thrown away every year. Earlier the focus has been mainly on consumers, wasting a big part of what we carry home from the supermarkets. But recently the Swedish national radio show Klotet (“The Globe”)revealed facts which show that around 100 000 tonnes of food is thrown away directly at the shops – without even reaching the consumers (some text in English).

Rejected vegetables

Most of the wasted food consists of fruit and vegetables with minor imperfections, which costumers reject, and which therefore goes to the waste containers. But in many food shops also packed food, such as pies, pastrami and meat balls is taken away from the refrigerated counters several days before expiry date.
In the radio feature the two reporters Malin Olofsson and Mikael Sjödell get a big bag of “almost thrown away” but perfectly edible food and cook a delicious dinner on it.

One way to the trash bin

But once the food gets to the refuse bins of the supermarkets, there is no return to the plate. Then the food has turned from being food into being waste, which will either be burnt and used as district heating and electricity, or be composted. Both are pretty good ways of using food waste, but still just taking care of 25 – 50 percent of the energy that was used to produce the food in the first place.
When the radio journalists looked closer on how much energy this actually is, they found that the energy that goes to waste from food that never even reaches the consumer (without counting the energy taken care of through burning or composting) would easily supply 5000 households with energy for one whole year.

Taking care of the food 

There are a few initiatives to take care of the food instead of throwing it away. For example in Lund the cook Karl-Johan Rehmert every day cooks and sells lunch dishes from the food which is about to be cleared away from the shelves. He says it’s very popular among the local students.
This feature has made me reflect quite a lot on how I go about shopping my food. Normally I try not to throw away food once it’s in my kitchen, but I haven’t really thought about what happens with the apples that I reject in the shop because of some tiny little mark on the skin…
The radio journalists present the idea of selling this food for a reduced price. Maybe that could help solving this problem?

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

October 8, 2009

  • Pol

    It seems to me this is also a question of trust, because everyone states is selling something naturaly grown, domestic, fresh and this is often not true. So people become very critical while picikng, rellying heavily on visual inspection methods, only one they have to defend them from genetical modified, pesticided and so on stuff. … Reducing prices without trust is not enough, because it could have negative psyhological effect.

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  • Annesfood

    You can easily just add it – either some finely minced fresh chillies, or a teaspoon or so of chili powder. (more or less depending on the strength, and your taste of course) And as for raspberries, just add them to the pan and press them into the batter!

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