About a third of the planet’s food goes to waste, often because of its looks. That’s enough to feed two billion people.
Tristram Stuart has 24 hours to produce a restaurant meal for 50 people—to plan a menu, gather food, then welcome guests to a venue in a city not his own. Complicating what sounds like a reality-show contest is a singular rule: Nearly all the ingredients must be sourced from farms and vendors intending to throw them out.
After racing back to New York City from a New Jersey farm where he gleaned 75 pounds of crookneck squash deemed by the farmers too crooked to sell, Stuart bolts from a car creeping through traffic and darts into a Greenwich Village bakery. Tall and blond, with a posh English accent, he launches into his ten-second spiel: “I run an organization that campaigns against food waste, and I’m pulling together a feast tomorrow made with food that won’t be sold or donated to charity. Do you have any bread that we could use?” The bakery doesn’t, but the clerk hands him two broken chocolate-chip cookies as consolation.
Stuart flings himself into the car. His next stop: the Union Square farmers market, where he spies a chef wrapping fish in squares of brioche dough, then trimming them into half circles. “Can I have your corners?” Stuart asks, with a meant-to-be-charming smile. The chef, uncharmed, declines. He’s going to make use of this dough himself. Undaunted, Stuart sails on through the market, delivering his pitch and eventually procuring discarded beet greens, wheatgrass, and apples.
Near Apartadó, Colombia, activist Tristram Stuart examines bananas too short, long, or curved for the European market. Locals consume some rejected bananas, but growers in the region annually dump millions of tons of edible fruit.
Eighteen hours later scores of chefs, food-recovery experts, and activists talk shop over chef Celia Lam’s squash tempura, turnip and tofu dumplings, and spiralized zucchini noodles. Stuart himself had cooked very little, but he had, without a single formal meeting, ensorcelled a half dozen people to devise a menu, gather ingredients, and then prep, cook, serve, and clean up a meal for little more than the chance to be associated with one of the most compelling figures in the international fight against food waste.
Across cultures, food waste goes against the moral grain. After all, nearly 800 million people worldwide suffer from hunger. But according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, we squander enough food—globally, 2.9 trillion pounds a year—to feed every one of them more than twice over. Where’s all that food—about a third of the planet’s production—going? In developing nations much is lost postharvest for lack of adequate storage facilities, good roads, and refrigeration. In comparison, developed nations waste more food farther down the supply chain, when retailers order, serve, or display too much and when consumers ignore leftovers in the back of the fridge or toss perishables before they’ve expired.
Wasting food takes an environmental toll as well. Producing food that no one eats—whether sausages or snickerdoodles—also squanders the water, fertilizer, pesticides, seeds, fuel, and land needed to grow it. The quantities aren’t trivial. Globally a year’s production of uneaten food guzzles as much water as the entire annual flow of the Volga, Europe’s most voluminous river. Growing the 133 billion pounds of food that retailers and consumers discard in the United States annually slurps the equivalent of more than 70 times the amount of oil lost in the Gulf of Mexico’s Deepwater Horizon disaster, according to American Wastelandauthor Jonathan Bloom. These staggering numbers don’t even include the losses from farms, fishing vessels, and slaughterhouses. If food waste were a country, it would be the third largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world, after China and the U.S. On a planet of finite resources, with the expectation of at least two billion more residents by 2050, this profligacy, Stuart argues in his book Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, is obscene.
In California’s Salinas Valley growers annually trash thousands of tons of fresh greens that lack sufficient shelf life for a cross-country journey.
At a Paris feast chefs simmer cosmetically challenged veggies—gleaned or donated—into a curry for 6,100 anti-waste enthusiasts
Others have been making similar arguments for years, but reducing food waste has become a matter of international urgency. Some U.S. schools, where children dump up to 40 percent of their lunches into the trash, are setting up sharing tables, letting students serve themselves portions they know they’ll eat, allotting more time for lunch, and scheduling it after recess—all proven methods of boosting consumption. Countless businesses, such as grocery stores, restaurants, and cafeterias, have stepped forward to combat waste by quantifying how much edible food isn’t consumed, optimizing their purchasing, shrinking portion sizes, and beefing up efforts to move excess to charities. Stuart himself has made a specialty of investigating conditions farther up the supply chain, where supermarket standards and ordering practices lead to massive, but mostly hidden, dumps of edible food.
Fifty miles north of Lima, Peru, in the farming town of Huaral, Stuart sips a glass of freshly squeezed satsuma juice with Luis Garibaldi, whose Fundo Maria Luisa is the largest grower of mandarins in the country. Pitched forward in his seat under a poolside pergola, Stuart asks: How much do you export? How much is rejected? For what reason? And what happens to those discards? Seventy percent of his crop, Garibaldi says, is exported to the European Union and North America. But 30 percent won’t be the right size, color, or sweetness, or it might have blemishes, scars, scratches, sunburn, fungus, or spiders. To local markets most of these rejects go, netting Garibaldi just one-third the price of the exports.
Stuart works through a ladder of queries that lead to a general thesis:Supermarkets’ cosmetic standards are crazily exacting—until supply shrinks, at which point they crumble like a chocolate lattice.
Lost En Route Every year some 2.9 trillion pounds of food—about a third of all that the world produces—never get consumed. Along the supply chain fruits and vegetables are lost or wasted at higher rates than other foods. Easily bruised and vulnerable to temperature swings en route from farm to table, they’re also usually the first to get tossed at home.
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“So grocers purchase this slightly imperfect fruit, and consumers still buy it?” Stuart asks.
“Yes,” Garibaldi says, nodding.
In the fragrant orchard, which lies in a valley under the parched crenellations of the Cordilleran foothills, Stuart plucks a mandarin unfit for any market but stops short of eating it. “I don’t mind maggots, actually, but that one was fermented,” he says, choosing instead a fruit with two tiny brown spots. Fundo Maria Luisa, it turns out, generates relatively little waste, thanks to its U.K. representative, who examines shipments and negotiates with any buyers poised to reject fruit for specious reasons. Often, Garibaldi says, a supermarket’s rejection of food for cosmetic reasons is merely a cover-up for its inaccurate forecasts or an unexpected drop in sales. Either way, the grower is expected to eat the loss.
Thirty percent of the mandarin crop in Huaral, Peru, won’t meet exacting export standards. Most of the rejects will be eaten locally. Globally 46 percent of fruits and vegetables never make it from farm to fork.
We drive 200 miles south, past tall sand dunes and wind-eroded ridges. All is ocher and dust until we reach valleys suddenly verdant with irrigated farmland—a consequence of foreign investment, favorable trade agreements, cheap labor, a warm climate, and a once bountiful aquifer. In the Ica Region, Stuart interviews a farmer who annually abandons in his fields millions of stalks of asparagus too thin or too curved or with bud tips slightly too open to export. Next a producer tells him that he dumps more than a thousand tons of infinitesimally imperfect Minneola tangelos and a hundred tons of grapefruit a year into a sandpit behind his packhouse.
Grade standards—industry driven and voluntary—were devised long ago to provide growers and buyers with a common language for evaluating produce and mediating disputes. They also can help reduce food waste. If growers can sort their asparagus or tangelos into established grades, they stand a better chance of finding markets for their “seconds.” Supermarkets have always been free to set their own standards, of course, but in recent years upscale grocers have started running their produce departments like beauty pageants, responding to customers, they say, who expect only platonically ideal produce: apples round and shiny, asparagus straight and tightly budded.
“It’s all about quality and appearance,” says Rick Stein, vice president of fresh foods at the Food Marketing Institute. “And only the best appearance will capture share of the consumer’s wallet.” Some of the produce that doesn’t capture share will be donated to food banks or chopped up and used in a supermarket’s prepared meals or salad bar, but most of U.S. grocers’ excess food is neither donated nor recycled. Stuart applauds some U.S. and EU supermarkets’ recent campaigns to sell “ugly” produce at a discount, but he prefers a systemic fix. “It would be far better to simply relax the standards,” he says, surveying a sea of abandoned Peruvian citrus for which no secondary market—ugly or otherwise—exists.
Gleaning for Good In the Picardy region of France a volunteer helps glean 1,100 pounds of potatoes too small to harvest mechanically. The potatoes will join carrots, eggplants, and other gleaned and donated vegetables at Paris’s Place de la République. There volunteers allied with Stuart’s group Feedback will chop this bounty into a meal for 6,100 diners. Feedback has helped organize more than 30 of these public feasts around the world to raise awareness of food waste and inspire local solutions.
For seven days Stuart traipses around farms and packhouses, runs through his questions, gathers data, and samples rejects. Between visits he folds himself like a fruit bat into the backseat of a crowded car and types. Tap, tap. He’s working out logistics for his next research trip, then accepting a drinks invitation from the general manager of the Food Bank of Peru. Tap, tap. An appointment with a food rescuer who just flew up from Santiago, Chile. Everywhere he goes, it seems, people want to tell Stuart an egregious story about food waste.
Sleep-deprived, unshaven, and sometimes hungover—what’s the point of being in a new country if you can’t sample what’s locally fermented?—Stuart remains focused. In fume-choked traffic he arranges to meet with a Peruvian congressman trying to overturn tax laws that incentivize dumping excess food over donating it. As we careen down a serpentine road, he taps out revisions to a proposed food-waste-reduction bill in the U.K. Parliament and a letter in support of expanding the authority of the U.K.’s Groceries Code Adjudicator. Next he floats to colleagues the idea of a Lima “disco soup”—a communal meal of rejected food, similar to the feast in New York City—to be held in four days for 50 to 100 people.
