Edmond Grace SJ
Edmond Grace SJ is a research fellow with the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice. He studied theology in the Milltown Institute, law at Trinity College Dublin, and Columbia University. He is the author of Democracy and Public Happiness, Advisor on Citizen Participation on The Wheel, and former Secretary for Ecology in the Jesuit European Social Centre.
FOOD WASTE AND FOOD LOSS
The leftover food on our plate once looked appetising, but when we scrape our plates into a bin it becomes slop. It is disgusting and must be moved out of our sight. The European Commission reckons that we produce 80 million tonnes of slop in the EU every year – 179 kg per person per year.1 With your average melon weighing in at 2kg, this means that each one of us produces one and three quarter melons of slop each week. In the entire EU that adds up to 770,000 decomposing melons every week. This happens every single week.
For most of human history very few could afford to waste food. Famine was frequent and the memory of starvation and death gave people a sense of food as something sacred. Only after the Second World War, when agriculture became industrialised and food was plentiful and cheap (and faith in God wasin rapid decline), did people’s attitude to food become purely pragmatic. In this worldview, food is for nourishment and enjoyment.
Books are written with recipes from around the world, offering every kind of good health. There is no limit except the size of our stomachs. We like to have lots of food within easy reach. Because of the volume involved, it is always prone to decay—and to being discarded.
Slop is bad enough, but the really bad news is that 78% of food waste takes place before we eat it. It is called “food loss.” Producers often throw away perfectly healthy fruit and vegetables simply because they are not the right colour, shape, or size. They claim to be responding to consumer taste. We have become so conditioned that we now see bumpy, gnarled shapes and irregular colour as inferior though it all tastes exactly the same. What matters, for the producer, is that regular shapes are easier to package.
Food processing is another source of food loss. Milk and oil need to be processed if they are to be edible but many foods, including bread, soups, salad, meat products, cereals, butter, and cheese, are processed and elaborately packaged. This facilitates mass transportation and the profitability of big brands. The term food mile refers to the distance which a particular item of food travels “from the field to the fork.” The higher the food mile the bigger the carbon footprint.
The most serious consequence of slop and food loss is that it all turns toxic and liquifies and, in a world with a growing shortage of drinkable water, these toxins seep through the soil and add to the problem.
As early as 1995, the EU was alert to the damage being done and the Landfill Directive was enacted. It set a target of reducing biodegradable waste, including food, by 35% over a period of 21 years. This sounds like a step in the right direction, and it would have been if anyone at the time had any idea how
much of this stuff was being produced. No one had any idea of what 35% of an unknown quantity would have looked like.
“EMPTY” OR “FULL” WORLD?
For most of human history we have lived in an “empty” world where the bounty of nature seemed endless and space was, to all intents and purposes, limitless. Something has changed in the past fifty years. We now live in a “full” world in which we overrun all kinds of limits and do all kinds of damage to the ecosystem.2 Not all are equally guilty. Compare the one and half melons of slop produced per person per week in Europe and North America to the 6 to 11kg produced each year in sub-Saharan Africa and South
East Asia – less than half a melon a month!
The problem is with our eating habits. On the one hand we are too fussy (or the producers are fussy on our behalf). On the other, we are too casual, piling our plates with more than we need. We will have to change our attitude to food and how we eat but it is hard to know how to begin.
ST IGNATIUS’S GUIDANCE
Intelligent reflection on our relationship with food is a feature of every religious tradition on earth. In the Hindu Dharmasastra literature, the reader is called on to offer food, as hospitality, to the gods, forebears and fellow human beings and, as alms, to monks and the needy.3 One Christian example, among many,
is St Ignatius Loyola who sets great store by restraint: “[p]rovided one takes care not to fall ill, the more one can cut back on one’s normal intake, the sooner will one arrive at the just mean in eating and drinking.”4 He suggests that after each meal or “some other time when one has no appetite for food” we decide on what amount to eat for the next meal. Above all, he says we should take care “not to
become wholeheartedly engrossed in what one is eating and not to be carried away by one’s
appetite at meals.”5 He calls for control both in the manner of eating and in the amount. This advice is practical and unremarkable, but imagine if we lived it not just at a personal but at a social and global level.
In typical fashion, Ignatius proposes Christ as the model for us to imitate at table: “[w]hile eating one should imagine that one is seeing Christ Our Lord eating with his apostles, considering the way he drinks, the way he looks and the way he talks.”6 Some imagination around our food practices is certainly needed
today. Returning to our spiritual traditions could start that imaginative process.
The traditional religious writers knew nothing about food waste or the limits of the planet, but their insights on food and its place in human living have something to teach our pragmatic secular age.
Footnotes
- José Carlos Romero and Jaime Tatay (coord.), Wasting Food, (Barcelona: Cristianisme i Justícia, 2022), 5. http://cristianismeijusticia.net/sites/default/files/pdf/en184.pdf ↩︎
- Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker and Anders Wijkman, Come on! Capitalism, Short-termism, Population and the Destruction of the Planet (New York, Springer, 2017), 9. ↩︎
- ‘From Feast to Fast: Food and the Indian Ascetic’, in Ascetics and Brahmins: Studies in Ideologies and Institutions, by Patrick Olivelle (Anthem Press, 2011), 76. ↩︎
- Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, no. 213. ↩︎
- Spiritual Exercises, no. 216. ↩︎
- Spiritual Exercises, no. 214 ↩︎
