What if the fight against waste prevents us from questioning the overproduction of food?

Today, the avail­able food pro­duc­tion of France and the United States amounts to more than 3,500 cal­or­ies per day per per­son – where­as needs are estim­ated at around 2,000–2,500 cal­or­ies. But these fig­ures are rarely quoted by those who fight against waste, wheth­er they are indus­tri­al­ists, asso­ci­ations, or politicians.

Mar­ie Mourad stud­ied the sub­ject in France and the United States, and in her thes­is high­lighted this poten­tially neg­at­ive effect of policies to reduce loss and waste. “In both coun­tries, large-scale dis­tri­bu­tion and food industry firms, in con­junc­tion with the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture in France and envir­on­ment­al asso­ci­ations in the United States, have pro­duced estim­ates focus­ing on the per­cent­ages of products thrown away, sec­tor by sec­tor, without ques­tion­ing either the quant­it­ies pro­duced, or the nature of the food con­cerned. They thus pro­mote a defin­i­tion of waste as a prob­lem of optim­ising exist­ing pro­duc­tion, dis­tri­bu­tion, and con­sump­tion, and favour the use of exist­ing sur­pluses rather than their reduc­tion at the source.”

As she shows, dur­ing the 2010s, com­pet­i­tion developed between the dif­fer­ent uses of sur­plus food. Seek­ing to use unsold food products, com­pan­ies are strength­en­ing the chan­nels for donat­ing con­sum­able food to food aid asso­ci­ations, gen­er­at­ing fin­an­cial rewards (usu­ally tax incent­ives) for donors.

Some sus­tain­ab­il­ity man­agers of food com­pan­ies are also set­ting up recyc­ling and sales of non-con­sum­able mater­i­als, in part­ner­ship with waste treat­ment com­pan­ies. Founders of start-ups and asso­ci­ations are seiz­ing the oppor­tun­ity of these devel­op­ments to devel­op inter­me­di­ary activ­it­ies that strengthen exist­ing chan­nels and cre­ate new chan­nels for pro­cessing and real­loc­at­ing sur­pluses. “These devel­op­ments reveal a mech­an­ism that could be described as the re-mar­ket­ing of sur­pluses,” emphas­ises Mar­ie Mourad. Their new mar­ket value is partly based, para­dox­ic­ally, on their de-mar­keted (not sold) or non-mar­keted (not inten­ded to be sold) character.

Anoth­er per­verse effect of the fight against waste as it is cur­rently organ­ised is that tax deduc­tions are most often cal­cu­lated accord­ing to the weight of donated food, which encour­ages people to favour quant­ity over qual­ity. For example, in the United States, but also in France, soda cans are treated as food: donat­ing them is prof­it­able for com­pan­ies, even though it is harm­ful to the bene­fi­ciary pop­u­la­tions, which are already suf­fer­ing from mal­nu­tri­tion, over­weight or obesity… 

On the oth­er hand, no meas­ures are being taken to curb retail­ers’ ever more tempt­ing offers of pro­mo­tions that encour­age con­sump­tion, on shelves that are gen­er­ally much more vis­ible and bet­ter presen­ted than those where goods that are almost out of date are stocked and there­fore offered at a lower cost. 

Anoth­er prob­lem in the fight against waste is the need – and the dif­fi­culty – of act­ing on sev­er­al factors and/or act­ors at the same time. Bar­bara Red­ling­shöfer, a research­er at INRAE, has just com­pleted a thes­is on food loss and waste in cit­ies and has stud­ied pub­lic policies aimed at redu­cing food waste in the Par­is region. She found that there are many pub­lic policies that offer levers for action, such as aware­ness-rais­ing cam­paigns, tax incent­ives for food dona­tions, and the sort­ing of bio-waste and its com­post­ing or methanisation.

These cam­paigns are part of policies related to food, waste, or energy, at vari­ous admin­is­trat­ive levels. But they are not very well coordin­ated. For example, a “com­post plan” is not coordin­ated with actions to com­bat waste and may even impli­citly legit­im­ise throw­ing away food by asso­ci­at­ing com­post­ing with a pos­it­ive gesture.

Most food waste is cur­rently treated by incin­er­a­tion, thanks to an effi­cient col­lec­tion and treat­ment sec­tor that needs to be fed… with waste! Although the legis­lat­ive frame­work provides for the expan­sion of food waste col­lec­tion and recyc­ling, we are far from achiev­ing the object­ives. “We need to artic­u­late and cre­ate syn­er­gies between these dif­fer­ent policies instead of man­aging them in silos,” emphas­ises Bar­bara Red­ling­shöfer. “Oth­er­wise, there is reas­on to fear that they will remain ineffective.”

The Ter­rit­ori­al Food Pro­jects (TFPs), which aim to relo­cate agri­cul­ture and food in the ter­rit­or­ies, should there­fore take account of this type of inter­ac­tion from the outset.

Fur­ther­more, she emphas­ises the extent to which indi­vidu­al beha­viour towards waste is diverse and com­plex and needs to be ana­lysed at the level of house­holds and their activ­it­ies, and there­fore bey­ond indi­vidu­als. “There are of course indi­vidu­al sens­it­iv­it­ies that are more or less recept­ive to this issue. But depend­ing on the com­pos­i­tion of the house­hold, the occu­pa­tion, the hob­bies, the sup­ply of shops in the neigh­bour­hood, prac­tices can differ.”

For example, con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, a large fam­ily wastes less per per­son than a couple without chil­dren, because they have more oppor­tun­it­ies to offer cooked leftovers. Anoth­er example is that, depend­ing on wheth­er people have time to go shop­ping dur­ing the day or not, they may fill their fridge as closely as pos­sible to their needs, or on the con­trary, they may stock up, some of which may end up in the bin. It will be import­ant to ana­lyse how the devel­op­ment of tele­work­ing will affect waste.

It can be assumed that it is easi­er for a per­son who works from home to do the daily shop­ping than for someone who has an hour’s com­mute to the office. Also, aspir­a­tions to eat “health­ily” may con­flict with want­ing to waste less, as eat­ing “health­ily” is often asso­ci­ated with eat­ing pro­duce, par­tic­u­larly fruit and veget­ables, as fresh as possible.

“This field of research on house­hold food prac­tices and their determ­in­ants is recent, but when we see the mul­ti­pli­city of inter­act­ing factors, we already know that we will have to find dif­fer­ent levers of action, and not think in silos as we tend to do today, tar­get­ing each cat­egory – con­sumers, dis­trib­ut­ors, pro­du­cers – sep­ar­ately,” con­cludes Bar­bara Redlingshöfer.

“There is some good news, how­ever: aware­ness of waste is grow­ing and the mobil­isa­tion for ‘ugly’ products, for example, is bear­ing fruit,” emphas­ises Mar­ie Mourad.

On the issue of use-by dates, Too Good to Go has made real pro­gress by hav­ing 62 com­pan­ies sign a pact to reduce food waste due to use-by dates. Thus, 3,000 product ranges raise con­sumer aware­ness of the Min­im­um Dur­ab­il­ity Dates (MDD) with “Observe, smell, taste” pic­to­grams to encour­age them to use their senses, and more than 600 anti-waste shelves have been deployed to sell products with a close or exceeded MDD. Proof that it is pos­sible to get around cer­tain reg­u­lat­ory obstacles.

Finally, some advice giv­en to house­holds, if fol­lowed, has proven effect­ive: such as mak­ing shop­ping lists before going to the shop avoids impulse buy­ing, meas­ur­ing out the quant­it­ies to be cooked accord­ing to needs and learn­ing to cook with leftovers pre­vents the bins from filling up too quickly. One example is that of Great Bri­tain, which car­ried out real work in the field, mobil­ising loc­al play­ers as close as pos­sible to fam­il­ies, organ­ising cook­ing work­shops and train­ing to strengthen their abil­ity to man­age their food better.

In France, asso­ci­ations such as Familles rurales carry out equi­val­ent actions through­out the coun­try, as close as pos­sible to the households.