Future of Food Waste. Tristram Stuart

”We are more than 7 billion people on earth today, and that is going to rise to 9 or 10 billion by 2050. We already consume more than the world can naturally generate. And the food system alone left to itself following current trajectories would take us above the emissions targets agreed in Paris by itself, food is about to cook the planet and that is not a great set of facts to look at. Food is by far the biggest impact that humans have on nature.” Tristram Stuart, Global Food Waste Activist

So how can we waste less food? One of the biggest global voices on food waste, Tristram Stuart joined us at Future Summit 2019 and shared some of the solutions. Here are some snipets from his speech. 

Tristram Stuart is an international award-winning author, speaker, campaigner and expert on the environmental and social impacts of food. His books, ”The Bloodless Revolution: a cultural history of vegetarianism from 1600 to the present” (2006) and ”Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal” (2009), have been described as "a genuinely revelatory contributions to the history of human ideas” (The Times) and have been translated into several languages. Tristram won the international environmental award in 2011, The Sophie Prize. He is an Ashoka Fellow, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders.

”Food waste is the biggest cause of deforestation. It's by far the biggest user of freshwater. It is the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions. It is behind most of the world's species extinctions. And we are right in the middle of the mass species extinction event, number six on planet Earth. And this is not some future scenario. This is right now. And food consumption continues to grow. Not only that, we're being told by the big food corporations and indeed venerable institutions like the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, that what we need urgently is to double food production or increase it by 50, 60 or 70, depending on who you're listening to, a massive increase in global food production. And yet the current food system is already massively exceeding what the earth can continue to produce indefinitely. And the problem with this as a strategy to tackle the global food problem is twofold.

The first is that this strategy is the single biggest actual threat to long term food security because global food production is being increased year on year. And some of that is happening because of great technologies in the Netherlands and other places where productivity is going through the roof on the glass and the rest of it. Some of it is happening because land in sub-Saharian Africa, which is underutilized and is not being used optimally, is being used more and more optimally.

Tristram Stuart @ Future Summit 2019

So there is increased productivity without increasing the footprint of agriculture. But the vast majority of global increases in food production are being achieved in the way they've always been achieved, which is extending the amount of land the world's agricultural system occupies. And that translates into deforestation in South America, deforestation in Southeast Asia, deforestation in Central Africa. And many other ways in which humans take more and more space on planet Earth, leaving less and less to natural ecosystems, which we entirely depend on for the sustainable operation of life on Earth. We are essentially undermining our ability to feed future generations, let alone leave enough space for any other species. So that's the first problem with this global strategy to double food production.

The second problem with this strategy is that it's entirely wrong. We don't need to double food production. This is something of a relief. If we're going to feed the 9 billion people on earth, indeed, we already produce enough now to feed 12 billion people. And the problem is that half the world consumes vastly more than is good for their health, that alone the health of the planet. In particular, we consume vastly more meat and dairy products than is good for our health. And this creates a huge opportunity. A win-win for the planet and also human health if we can reduce that over-consumption. And the second area of unnecessary production is that of food waste.

So if we stop wasting food and stop over-consuming food on a systemic level, the ultimate objective is to reduce the total demand for land and other resources currently locked into the food system. And that has to be our aim.

The reason why I am confident in saying what I just said about it "is not necessary, switch off the alarm bells, stop the lights flashing, we don't need to double food production by 2050 to avoid global famine" it's because I have looked at the food availability data for every country on earth and what I found is represented in this chart. In a nutshell, what this data demonstrates is that every rich country in Western Europe and North America has already in its shops and restaurants available to its local population between one and a half and two times the nutritional requirements of that population.

So a country like the USA has twice as much food available to its population as it's required to feed that population. But surplus either goes down the throats of an overfed population or it goes into their trash. And, if we're to meet the environmental requirements of a sustainable planet as well as good human health, that is the place to go and my environmental benefits not by going out and extending the agricultural frontier further and further into the world's remaining forests.

So how does one tackle this bulldozer of a food system? Well, probably the truth is that we can't.

The first thing to understand about what they say we need to do is that this need, they talk about a need to feed the world, need to feed seven billion people, we need to double food production. This need is not, in my view, reflecting in any real sense what I would describe as a need, an existential requirement or a need that we have. The need that they're talking about in truth is the need, and I don't blame them for this, the need for corporations to generate a maximum financial return for their shareholders. Most of these companies are locked into a legal requirement to serve this need. So let's remember that the food system as we have it is not principally built on supplying healthy food to sustain the human population of Earth.

That is not what the current global food system is designed to achieve. It does achieve that to some extent. But this is arguably an ancillary benefit of the primary needs being met by the global food system. And that need is the need to generate a maximum financial return to the corporations that are driving this food system.

How do we undermine this edifice and try to create a food system that does the opposite, that does feed the population with a healthy diet, that does it whilst living within planetary means? Well, the good news is that we already do know how to do food in a way that can do good to nature.

Soils are the most potent way that we can get carbon out of the atmosphere and put it back into the ground, because that is what soil is, carbon locked into the ground. And plants annually suck carbon out of the atmosphere. And then as they rot, they put it back into the soil. Harnessing that incredible power through agriculture is, I believe, one of the most powerful tools we have to combat climate change. And if we create a food system designed to do that rather than the reverse, we have an amazing weapon on our hands. Plants also regenerate water systems. They can help to put water back into the soil rather than sucking it out. They can create habitat rather than destroy it. They certainly can produce healthy food. So the food system done right is our best friend. And even more potent than that, food, I believe, is one of the most powerful social tools we have. The sharing of food it's something that we see universally practiced in all human societies. People come together around food.

I believe that by creating companionship around a positive food system, we can transform our food system into a nature-friendly health generating one instead of the reverse.

And I imagine as the many events that I have attended and organized along these lines, over that meal, everyone sat there and said, wow, this is so delicious, perfectly good food. Why would anyone throw it? What can we do about it here in Romania, what can we do about it globally?

Creating that fabric of conversation, of entrepreneurship. We have organized events all over the world and every one of them creates sparks. And those sparks turn into organizations or just a changing food culture, greater awareness. I believe that this is the power that we can use to change the food system. Unfortunately, as I continued my journey through the food system researching the problem of food waste, I discovered that the waste at the back of the dumpster in the supermarket is the tip of the iceberg of the food waste being created by the world's food supermarkets. And this is where you find a much, much larger quantity. It's in the fields, on the farms all around the world, producing food for the supermarket system. This is a typical situation.

Companionship and energizing local populations around a cultural change, putting pressure on the supermarkets to change, using those insiders, those people in the supermarkets who throw away the food every day, they hate that, everyone hates that job of chucking food into a dumpster. And everyone says to their manager, come on. Can we not just give this to a charity or do something more sensible with it than chuck it in a dumpster? I know lots of people who write to me from all over the world about this problem, who have lost their jobs over it, who have started initiatives, whether formal or informal, to try and tackle it. And years ago, in fact, 10 years ago, I organized the first of a large version of that event Feeding the 5000. We've fed 5000 people in Trafalgar Square with food that otherwise would've been wasted, and now we have already organized them in 50 cities all over the world. We've done disco soups.

On a slightly positive note,13000 slices of fresh bread were being wasted by a single sandwich factory in the United Kingdom, in 2008. I convinced this particular factory and then many others to start diverting the bread, at least to livestock feed, which it did. But it wasn't until 2015 that a brewer in Brussels, Sebastian, showed me that beer was invented by the ancient Mesopotamians thousands of years ago to preserve grains that would otherwise be wasted. The inebriation that results from drinking beer is a happy ancillary benefit. It's mainly a preservation technology to create a long shelf-life product. Craft beer is a global movement and I've spent 20 years building a food waste movement. Let's bring these three things together and launch toast ale. And so I set up Toast Ale to generate profit for 100 percent of our profit goes to Feedback and other charities that are fighting to change the food system.

Toast Ale Beer made from wasted bread slices

If we're going to save the world, we have to throw a better party than the people destroying it. We have to make it a hedonistic approach to saving the planet. Everything that we do has to be about having fun and enjoying the fruits of the earth, enjoying each other as much as we can as companions, because it is only by putting forward that positive note, even if we have a deep, dark pessimist inside us, not letting go of that anger and that pessimism, but to upcycle it, as nature always does with death and darkness, to upcycle it into love, life, and joy. That is our job if we want to bring about a global transformation of the world's food system and indeed the economic system as a whole. So go and have better parties.”

A full speech by Tristram Stuart at Future Summit 2019 can be seen here.