LONDON LETTER: Our wasteful attitude to food is unsustainable, yet a woman is on trial for stealing from supermarket bins
SASHA HALL lives in Chelmsford in Essex over a Tesco Express. In late January, she noticed staff dumping pies, potato waffles and ham into a rubbish bin, following a power cut the day before.
Now, she is facing a charge of theft by finding for allegedly taking £215.16 of food, including 100 packs of ham, after a store manager heard footsteps on the roof and saw men pulling the bags of food from the bins.
Hall (21) could have opted to have her case heard by magistrates, where she would have faced a maximum jail term of six months, or a £5,000 fine if convicted, but, instead, she has opted for a trial by jury. Her case has been adjourned until April 12th.
Hall, who works for another supermarket chain, said recently: “[Police] knocked on the door and said if I didn’t open up they would use a battering ram. They treated me like I was a hardened criminal and when we left they raided my house.”
Saying that she wanted the food to feed her extended family, she went on: “I would think the police have better things to be doing with their time than going after people who pick up potato waffles from the street. It’s all been blown totally out of proportion.
“Tesco clearly did not want the food. They dumped it and, rather than see it go to waste, I thought I could help feed me and my family for a week or two.”
Hall was taken to the police station in handcuffs.
In court, a prosecutor pointed out that the food had been stored in a service yard at the back of the supermarket and not out the front.
Supermarkets appear to have varying policies regarding food that has passed its sell-by date, with differences between branches of the same chain. In a few, particularly around central London, some managers leave out sandwiches and other perishables that have passed their sell-by, but not their use-by deadline. Late at night, people can often be seen foraging for meals.
Sainsbury’s gives away £1.3 million worth of produce to charities, out of a total turnover of £20 billion.
In the Chelmsford case, Tesco says the food was destined for a power station to be burned to produce electricity.
The statistics for food waste in the UK are staggering. Fifteen per cent of all food and drink bought in 2008 was thrown away unused, according to figures from the UK’s department of environment, food and rural affairs.
A third of all bread is dumped; a quarter of all potatoes and vegetables and a fifth of all fruit is wasted. Even 6 per cent of alcoholic drinks are poured down the sink, according to figures published last July.
In tonnage terms, the figures are even starker. Six hundred and thirty thousand tonnes of bread are thrown into the rubbish bin annually; 750,000 tonnes of vegetables; 400,000 tonnes of potatoes; 610,000 tonnes of fruit; 390,000 tonnes of cereals; and 440,000 tonnes of meat and fish.
Price matters, though. “In general, higher price items were wasted at a lower rate than lower price items,” said the department, pointing out that singletons leave 22 per cent of everything they buy unused, while families do better, throwing away 14 per cent.
The poorer record of singles has, perhaps, much to do with the size of food products: 46 per cent of all bread in such homes goes unused, 37 per cent of vegetables and 28 per cent of fruit.
The structure of the supermarket trade in the UK, which is dominated by a number of giants, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons, ensures that waste is invisibly produced, rather than dumped in the public eye as in Chelmsford.
In an October 2010 report to the Royal Society, researchers pointed out that food suppliers would often overproduce for fear that they would be delisted by supermarkets if they failed to meet short-notice orders.
Supermarkets’ perishable own- brands ranges “cannot be sold elsewhere and becomes waste”, they said. However, they pointed out that small corner shops were proportionally more wasteful than supermarkets because they were used for unpredictable “top-up” shopping.
Perhaps because of lifestyle changes and greater demands for convenience, the problem has worsened dramatically since the 1970s. In 1976, a survey showed that 6.5 per cent of food was wasted during the summer and 5.4 per cent in winter.
In January, a UK-led report by international experts warned that up to half of all food produced throughout the world is wasted. Poorer countries lose it as it comes from the fields; richer ones do so once it has been bought in shops.
Calling for major public campaigns, The Future of Food and Farming: Challenges and Choices for Global Sustainabilitywarned that the bad habits would come back to haunt the world as its population exceeded nine billion by 2050.
Some things will have to change, particularly the use of sell-by and best-before dates by supermarkets, which often have to keep an eye on dangers that customers will sue if they get stomach upsets. Cheap sensors could better detect spoilage than such labels, experts argue, while “productive recycling of surplus food deemed as non-premium quality” should be encouraged – which, it could be said, is rather what Sasha Hall is alleged to have been doing.
