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.