Chef-patron Michel Roux at Le Gavroche, the two-star Michelin restaurant in London, feeds his staff on potato peelings. This information, so in tune with our thrifty times, appears in Roux’s new autobiography. I asked how exactly he cooked them. The answer is that the peel is twice-fried in animal fat, like the best chips. Roux said that the potatoes should be peeled with a knife, “so as to leave a little flesh on the skin” for the workers’ nourishment. Which is thoughtful of him. And inspiring for a nation that throws away 359,000 tonnes of potatoes every year.
On the same day last week that I heard about potato-peel cuisine in London’s very upscale Mayfair, another grand establishment, the foreign affairs think tank Chatham House launched its report about food. This had no recipes in it, but lots to encourage us to squeeze all the goodness possible from every kitchen scrap. Food Futures: Rethinking UK Strategy pictures a bleak and hungry Britain not far ahead, suffering volatile food prices and recurring shortages, unable to distance itself from the famines expected to devastate the world as climate change bites and the population heads north of 9 billion.
The World Bank says that as early as 2030 the world will need to produce 50 percent more food than it does now, chiefly because as India and China get richer, its newly affluent population will be demanding meat instead of greens. For 60 years, food production has risen in line with global population growth, but that is coming to an end. “The UK can no longer take its food supply for granted,” the report said.
At first sight, the British food economy is not healthy today and we’ve only begun to feel the first tremors of world food shortages. We import 52 percent of our food; the figure seems likely to rise since, as the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) figures state, 63 percent of our 300,000 farms are essentially not economically viable. But if you look a little further, these numbers mean rather less than appears. The UK imports a lot, but exports too — £10 billion (US$14.4 billion) in 2006. You might despair that the great arable lands of Scotland do not provide that country’s bread, but that’s chiefly because 60 percent of Scottish wheat goes to the whisky industry.
HEALTHY
DEFRA’s figures for 2007 show that if you take account of the exports, the UK is a rather healthier 60 percent self-sufficient in all foods, rising to 73 percent if you look at foods that actually can be grown in this country. And these figures are higher than they have been in most decades of the last century; the UK produces far more of its own food now than it did in 1939, just before the biggest shock to UK food security in modern history.
Faced with the 21st-century’s equivalent of a wartime blockade, does the UK need to reach for high-tech solutions such as genetic modification (GM) and nano-technology? The experts’ consensus is that GM is no magic bullet; it could aid the small-scale farmers on whom the developing world depends, but is less relevant in a mature agricultural economy. Tackling waste could do a lot for food security. Hilary Benn, DEFRA’s minister, likes to tell people that the entire international food aid program amounts to only a fifth of what a single developed nation throws away in a single year.
In the UK, some austerity could hardly hurt. Start with imports. A look at British shopping lists reveals a nation of gluttons and wastrels; Britons make party-planners for Roman feasts look canny. If Lucullus imported tigers’ sweetbreads and other exotic amuses-gueules, it was because he could not get them locally. The British bring lamb and butter from the other side of the world and most of their bacon from mainland Europe, not because it tastes better but because it is marginally cheaper.
A mixed salad illustrates the absurdity. The British, it seems, must have fresh salad all year, so they import 60 percent of it. Processors and retailers throw away on average 40 percent of what they eventually sell, because of the problems in forecasting demand (if it’s raining, shoppers buy less salad, but buyers have to place orders two weeks ahead). Then, at home, the Brits throw away 60 percent — £620 million — of all they buy because they never get around to eating it. At a rough estimate, the UK imports twice as much salad as it actually eats.
Most of these statistics come from a fascinating exercise in dissecting the nation’s rubbish bins, carried out by the DEFRA-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP). It found that, in total, British households throw away 6.7 million tonnes of food, at a value of £10 billion, 30 percent of the UK’s food wasted. On the back of this fantastic statistic, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown helped launch a consumer education campaign — Love Food, Hate Waste — last May. This was mocked, in part because, while British house-spouses have clearly mislaid the poker-work sign that said “Waste Not, Want Not,” it was pretty obvious that they were not the chief villains.
RETAIL WASTE
WRAP puts the total of food waste at 20 million tonnes. Three times as much food is wasted by retailers, processors and manufacturers, including agriculture. But the easy option is to put the blame and the pressure on the consumer. Industry is a much trickier target.
WRAP has got some commitments from retailers: extra advice on packets, rationalization of sell-by dates and fewer buy-one, get-one-free offers. But WRAP has no remit to tackle much more serious problems that lie at the heart of supermarkets’ buying and marketing strategies. Near monopoly gives the shops enormous power. As a fruit or vegetable farmer, you may find that supermarkets are prepared to take your crop. But if they decide to discount it, they will pay you less. If they have to throw it away, they may even charge back the costs of disposal. So, one of the basic controls in retail — you don’t stock what you can’t sell — is gone.
It is a familiar foodie’s song, blaming the ills of food economy on the supermarkets. But it is increasingly cogent. As the Chatham House report points out, the power in the system is largely in the hands of the four companies that sell 75 percent of our food. Their influence on what we eat, the shape of our high streets and, indeed, the way that agriculture functions is enormous. Food waste, poor health and many of the failures of the farming economy share a cause: Food is too cheap and for that you have to blame the downward pressure on prices of the supermarkets. The UK now has the cheapest food in real terms in modern history. That is not necessarily a good thing.
Tim Lang, professor of food policy at (London) City University, is an adviser on food security and sustainability to government. He says that attitudes are changing fast from a time, quite recently, when politicians would privately ask if there was any need for farming in the UK at all and food policy was best described as “leave it to Tesco [the dominant supermarket chain].”
“But we haven’t got a coherent policy. Are we raising production or are we relying on world food markets? Which? Because we’ve got to get on with it.”
The days when representativess from Tesco and the other supermarkets led DEFRA workshops on sustainability may be coming into an end; there are pragmatic voices in food economics calling for an end to cozy voluntary agreements with the food industry. They have not delivered. It will take regulation to address big retail’s excesses and ensure our food security. And we can all usefully learn to French fry potato peel.
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