0:00:00.959,0:00:03.717
The job of uncovering the global food waste scandal

0:00:03.717,0:00:06.735
started for me when I was 15 years old.

0:00:06.735,0:00:09.256
I bought some pigs. I was living in Sussex.

0:00:09.256,0:00:11.639
And I started to feed them in the most traditional

0:00:11.639,0:00:13.610
and environmentally friendly way.

0:00:13.610,0:00:15.935
I went to my school kitchen, and I said,

0:00:15.935,0:00:17.481
"Give me the scraps that my school friends have turned

0:00:17.481,0:00:18.347
their noses up at."

0:00:18.347,0:00:21.011
I went to the local baker and took their stale bread.

0:00:21.011,0:00:23.743
I went to the local greengrocer, and I went to a farmer

0:00:23.743,0:00:25.581
who was throwing away potatoes because they were

0:00:25.581,0:00:28.767
the wrong shape or size for supermarkets.

0:00:28.767,0:00:31.856
This was great. My pigs turned that food waste

0:00:31.856,0:00:34.513
into delicious pork. I sold that pork

0:00:34.513,0:00:36.500
to my school friends' parents, and I made

0:00:36.500,0:00:41.137
a good pocket money addition to my teenage allowance.

0:00:41.137,0:00:44.019
But I noticed that most of the food that I was giving my pigs

0:00:44.019,0:00:46.402
was in fact fit for human consumption,

0:00:46.402,0:00:48.671
and that I was only scratching the surface,

0:00:48.671,0:00:51.533
and that right the way up the food supply chain,

0:00:51.533,0:00:54.751
in supermarkets, greengrocers, bakers, in our homes,

0:00:54.751,0:00:58.011
in factories and farms, we were hemorrhaging out food.

0:00:58.011,0:01:00.608
Supermarkets didn't even want to talk to me

0:01:00.608,0:01:01.982
about how much food they were wasting.

0:01:01.982,0:01:04.466
I'd been round the back. I'd seen bins full of food

0:01:04.466,0:01:07.217
being locked and then trucked off to landfill sites,

0:01:07.217,0:01:10.238
and I thought, surely there is something more sensible

0:01:10.238,0:01:13.405
to do with food than waste it.

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One morning, when I was feeding my pigs,

0:01:15.710,0:01:19.397
I noticed a particularly tasty-looking sun-dried tomato loaf

0:01:19.397,0:01:21.472
that used to crop up from time to time.

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I grabbed hold of it,

0:01:22.874,0:01:26.420
sat down, and ate my breakfast with my pigs. (Laughter)

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That was the first act of what I later learned to call freeganism,

0:01:29.540,0:01:33.795
really an exhibition of the injustice of food waste,

0:01:33.795,0:01:36.145
and the provision of the solution to food waste,

0:01:36.145,0:01:38.799
which is simply to sit down and eat food,

0:01:38.799,0:01:40.287
rather than throwing it away.

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That became, as it were, a way of confronting

0:01:43.566,0:01:46.553
large businesses in the business of wasting food,

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and exposing, most importantly, to the public,

0:01:49.074,0:01:51.244
that when we're talking about food being thrown away,

0:01:51.244,0:01:53.383
we're not talking about rotten stuff, we're not talking about

0:01:53.383,0:01:56.095
stuff that's beyond the pale.

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We're talking about good, fresh food that is being wasted

0:01:58.211,0:02:00.749
on a colossal scale.

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Eventually, I set about writing my book,

0:02:02.606,0:02:04.660
really to demonstrate the extent of this problem

0:02:04.660,0:02:08.056
on a global scale. What this shows is

0:02:08.056,0:02:11.535
a nation-by-nation breakdown of the likely level

0:02:11.535,0:02:14.637
of food waste in each country in the world.

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Unfortunately, empirical data, good, hard stats, don't exist,

0:02:18.525,0:02:21.007
and therefore to prove my point, I first of all had to find

0:02:21.007,0:02:23.160
some proxy way of uncovering

0:02:23.160,0:02:25.405
how much food was being wasted.

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So I took the food supply of every single country

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and I compared it to what was actually likely

0:02:31.003,0:02:33.035
to be being consumed in each country.

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That's based on diet intake surveys, it's based on

0:02:36.922,0:02:39.588
levels of obesity, it's based on a range of factors

0:02:39.588,0:02:40.930
that gives you an approximate guess

0:02:40.930,0:02:44.157
as to how much food is actually going into people's mouths.

0:02:44.157,0:02:46.886
That black line in the middle of that table

0:02:46.886,0:02:49.882
is the likely level of consumption

0:02:49.882,0:02:54.244
with an allowance for certain levels of inevitable waste.

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There will always be waste. I'm not that unrealistic

0:02:56.163,0:02:58.143
that I think we can live in a waste-free world.

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But that black line shows what a food supply should be

0:03:02.016,0:03:06.470
in a country if they allow for a good, stable, secure,

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nutritional diet for every person in that country.

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Any dot above that line, and you'll quickly notice that

0:03:12.626,0:03:15.327
that includes most countries in the world,

0:03:15.327,0:03:19.616
represents unnecessary surplus, and is likely to reflect

0:03:19.616,0:03:22.238
levels of waste in each country.

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As a country gets richer, it invests more and more

0:03:25.507,0:03:26.798
in getting more and more surplus

0:03:26.798,0:03:29.608
into its shops and restaurants,

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and as you can see, most European

0:03:31.664,0:03:33.076
and North American countries

0:03:33.076,0:03:36.216
fall between 150 and 200 percent

0:03:36.216,0:03:39.596
of the nutritional requirements of their populations.

0:03:39.596,0:03:42.004
So a country like America has twice as much food

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on its shop shelves and in its restaurants

0:03:44.608,0:03:48.176
than is actually required to feed the American people.

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But the thing that really struck me,

0:03:49.736,0:03:53.951
when I plotted all this data, and it was a lot of numbers,

0:03:53.951,0:03:57.617
was that you can see how it levels off.

0:03:57.617,0:04:00.685
Countries rapidly shoot towards that 150 mark,

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and then they level off, and they don't really go on rising

0:04:03.973,0:04:05.519
as you might expect.

0:04:05.519,0:04:08.064
So I decided to unpack that data a little bit further

0:04:08.064,0:04:10.349
to see if that was true or false.

0:04:10.349,0:04:11.843
And that's what I came up with.

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If you include not just the food that ends up

0:04:13.770,0:04:15.894
in shops and restaurants, but also the food

0:04:15.894,0:04:18.050
that people feed to livestock,

0:04:18.050,0:04:21.553
the maize, the soy, the wheat, that humans could eat

0:04:21.553,0:04:24.034
but choose to fatten livestock instead to produce

0:04:24.034,0:04:25.965
increasing amounts of meat and dairy products,

0:04:25.965,0:04:27.632
what you find is that most rich countries

0:04:27.632,0:04:31.955
have between three and four times the amount of food

0:04:31.955,0:04:35.039
that their population needs to feed itself.

0:04:35.039,0:04:38.322
A country like America has four times the amount of food

0:04:38.322,0:04:41.284
that it needs.

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When people talk about the need to increase global

0:04:44.246,0:04:46.906
food production to feed those nine billion people

0:04:46.906,0:04:49.418
that are expected on the planet by 2050,

0:04:49.418,0:04:51.139
I always think of these graphs.

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The fact is, we have an enormous buffer

0:04:54.090,0:04:57.971
in rich countries between ourselves and hunger.

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We've never had such gargantuan surpluses before.

0:05:02.647,0:05:05.313
In many ways, this is a great success story

0:05:05.313,0:05:09.452
of human civilization, of the agricultural surpluses

0:05:09.452,0:05:12.805
that we set out to achieve 12,000 years ago.

0:05:12.805,0:05:16.362
It is a success story. It has been a success story.

0:05:16.362,0:05:18.899
But what we have to recognize now is that we are

0:05:18.899,0:05:22.531
reaching the ecological limits that our planet can bear,

0:05:22.531,0:05:25.168
and when we chop down forests, as we are every day,

0:05:25.168,0:05:26.516
to grow more and more food,

0:05:26.516,0:05:30.264
when we extract water from depleting water reserves,

0:05:30.264,0:05:33.652
when we emit fossil fuel emissions in the quest

0:05:33.652,0:05:34.944
to grow more and more food,

0:05:34.944,0:05:37.795
and then we throw away so much of it,

0:05:37.795,0:05:40.731
we have to think about what we can start saving.

0:05:40.731,0:05:44.456
And yesterday, I went to one of the local supermarkets

0:05:44.456,0:05:46.672
that I often visit to

0:05:46.672,0:05:50.853
inspect, if you like, what they're throwing away.

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I found quite a few packets of biscuits amongst

0:05:53.256,0:05:54.883
all the fruit and vegetables and everything else

0:05:54.883,0:05:55.830
that was in there.

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And I thought, well this could serve as a symbol for today.

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So I want you to imagine that these nine biscuits

0:06:00.705,0:06:04.233
that I found in the bin represent the global food supply,

0:06:04.233,0:06:05.834
okay? We start out with nine.

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That's what's in fields around the world every single year.

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The first biscuit we're going to lose

0:06:11.078,0:06:12.837
before we even leave the farm.

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That's a problem primarily associated with

0:06:16.102,0:06:17.766
developing work agriculture, whether it's

0:06:17.766,0:06:20.271
a lack of infrastructure, refrigeration, pasteurization,

0:06:20.271,0:06:23.184
grain stores, even basic fruit crates, which means

0:06:23.184,0:06:26.933
that food goes to waste before it even leaves the fields.

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The next three biscuits are the foods that we decide

0:06:30.429,0:06:34.169
to feed to livestock, the maize, the wheat and the soya.

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Unfortunately, our beasts are inefficient animals,

0:06:39.013,0:06:43.188
and they turn two-thirds of that into feces and heat,

0:06:43.188,0:06:45.806
so we've lost those two, and we've only kept this one

0:06:45.806,0:06:48.040
in meat and dairy products.

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Two more we're going to throw away directly into bins.

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This is what most of us think of when we think

0:06:53.177,0:06:55.688
of food waste, what ends up in the garbage,

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what ends up in supermarket bins,

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what ends up in restaurant bins. We've lost another two,

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and we've left ourselves with just four biscuits to feed on.

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That is not a superlatively efficient use of global resources,

0:07:07.823,0:07:10.283
especially when you think of the billion hungry people

0:07:10.283,0:07:12.423
that exist already in the world.

0:07:12.423,0:07:14.406
Having gone through the data, I then needed

0:07:14.406,0:07:18.084
to demonstrate where that food ends up.

0:07:18.084,0:07:19.703
Where does it end up? We're used to seeing the stuff

0:07:19.703,0:07:21.606
on our plates, but what about all the stuff

0:07:21.606,0:07:23.546
that goes missing in between?

0:07:23.546,0:07:25.958
Supermarkets are an easy place to start.

0:07:25.958,0:07:28.549
This is the result of my hobby,

0:07:28.549,0:07:33.025
which is unofficial bin inspections. (Laughter)

0:07:33.025,0:07:35.622
Strange you might think, but if we could rely on corporations

0:07:35.622,0:07:38.730
to tell us what they were doing in the back of their stores,

0:07:38.730,0:07:41.214
we wouldn't need to go sneaking around the back,

0:07:41.214,0:07:43.770
opening up bins and having a look at what's inside.

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But this is what you can see more or less on

0:07:45.730,0:07:49.242
every street corner in Britain, in Europe, in North America.

0:07:49.242,0:07:52.308
It represents a colossal waste of food,

0:07:52.308,0:07:54.810
but what I discovered whilst I was writing my book

0:07:54.810,0:07:58.154
was that this very evident abundance of waste

0:07:58.154,0:08:01.098
was actually the tip of the iceberg.

0:08:01.098,0:08:03.154
When you start going up the supply chain,

0:08:03.154,0:08:06.140
you find where the real food waste is happening

0:08:06.140,0:08:08.127
on a gargantuan scale.

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Can I have a show of hands

0:08:09.600,0:08:14.058
if you have a loaf of sliced bread in your house?

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Who lives in a household where that crust --

0:08:15.977,0:08:19.170
that slice at the first and last end of each loaf --

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who lives in a household where it does get eaten?

0:08:21.614,0:08:23.981
Okay, most people, not everyone, but most people,

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and this is, I'm glad to say, what I see across the world,

0:08:26.437,0:08:29.226
and yet has anyone seen a supermarket or sandwich shop

0:08:29.226,0:08:31.462
anywhere in the world that serves sandwiches

0:08:31.462,0:08:33.236
with crusts on it? (Laughter)

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I certainly haven't.

0:08:34.819,0:08:39.987
So I kept on thinking, where do those crusts go? (Laughter)

0:08:39.987,0:08:42.202
This is the answer, unfortunately:

0:08:42.202,0:08:44.114
13,000 slices of fresh bread coming out of

0:08:44.114,0:08:49.715
this one single factory every single day, day-fresh bread.

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In the same year that I visited this factory,

0:08:51.224,0:08:55.674
I went to Pakistan, where people in 2008 were going hungry

0:08:55.674,0:08:59.451
as a result of a squeeze on global food supplies.

0:08:59.451,0:09:01.635
We contribute to that squeeze

0:09:01.635,0:09:04.627
by depositing food in bins here in Britain

0:09:04.627,0:09:06.834
and elsewhere in the world. We take food

0:09:06.834,0:09:09.940
off the market shelves that hungry people depend on.

0:09:09.940,0:09:12.490
Go one step up, and you get to farmers,

0:09:12.490,0:09:14.650
who throw away sometimes a third or even more

0:09:14.650,0:09:16.695
of their harvest because of cosmetic standards.

0:09:16.695,0:09:19.618
This farmer, for example, has invested 16,000 pounds

0:09:19.618,0:09:23.042
in growing spinach, not one leaf of which he harvested,

0:09:23.042,0:09:25.496
because there was a little bit of grass growing in amongst it.

0:09:25.496,0:09:27.976
Potatoes that are cosmetically imperfect,

0:09:27.976,0:09:29.509
all going for pigs.

0:09:29.509,0:09:33.547
Parsnips that are too small for supermarket specifications,

0:09:33.547,0:09:35.563
tomatoes in Tenerife,

0:09:35.563,0:09:37.368
oranges in Florida,

0:09:37.368,0:09:40.372
bananas in Ecuador, where I visited last year,

0:09:40.372,0:09:42.787
all being discarded. This is one day's waste

0:09:42.787,0:09:45.324
from one banana plantation in Ecuador.

0:09:45.324,0:09:47.532
All being discarded, perfectly edible,

0:09:47.532,0:09:50.020
because they're the wrong shape or size.

0:09:50.020,0:09:51.600
If we do that to fruit and vegetables,

0:09:51.600,0:09:54.415
you bet we can do it to animals too.

0:09:54.415,0:09:57.154
Liver, lungs, heads, tails,

0:09:57.154,0:09:59.132
kidneys, testicles,

0:09:59.132,0:10:00.845
all of these things which are traditional,

0:10:00.845,0:10:03.660
delicious and nutritious parts of our gastronomy

0:10:03.660,0:10:07.156
go to waste. Offal consumption has halved

0:10:07.156,0:10:09.691
in Britain and America in the last 30 years.

0:10:09.691,0:10:12.331
As a result, this stuff gets fed to dogs at best,

0:10:12.331,0:10:14.100
or is incinerated.

0:10:14.100,0:10:17.947
This man, in Kashgar, Xinjiang province, in Western China,

0:10:17.947,0:10:19.862
is serving up his national dish.

0:10:19.862,0:10:21.577
It's called sheep's organs.

0:10:21.577,0:10:23.244
It's delicious, it's nutritious,

0:10:23.244,0:10:25.652
and as I learned when I went to Kashgar,

0:10:25.652,0:10:28.721
it symbolizes their taboo against food waste.

0:10:28.721,0:10:30.917
I was sitting in a roadside cafe.

0:10:30.917,0:10:33.521
A chef came to talk to me, I finished my bowl,

0:10:33.521,0:10:35.286
and halfway through the conversation, he stopped talking

0:10:35.286,0:10:37.852
and he started frowning into my bowl.

0:10:37.852,0:10:39.731
I thought, "My goodness, what taboo have I broken?

0:10:39.731,0:10:41.325
How have I insulted my host?"

0:10:41.325,0:10:43.063
He pointed at three grains of rice

0:10:43.063,0:10:47.347
at the bottom of my bowl, and he said, "Clean." (Laughter)

0:10:47.347,0:10:49.259
I thought, "My God, you know, I go around the world

0:10:49.259,0:10:50.675
telling people to stop wasting food.

0:10:50.675,0:10:55.724
This guy has thrashed me at my own game." (Laughter)

0:10:55.724,0:10:58.947
But it gave me faith. It gave me faith that we, the people,

0:10:58.947,0:11:03.983
do have the power to stop this tragic waste of resources

0:11:03.983,0:11:06.183
if we regard it as socially unacceptable

0:11:06.183,0:11:07.687
to waste food on a colossal scale,

0:11:07.687,0:11:10.240
if we make noise about it, tell corporations about it,

0:11:10.255,0:11:12.875
tell governments we want to see an end to food waste,

0:11:12.875,0:11:15.371
we do have the power to bring about that change.

0:11:15.371,0:11:18.083
Fish, 40 to 60 percent of European fish

0:11:18.083,0:11:21.164
are discarded at sea, they don't even get landed.

0:11:21.164,0:11:23.856
In our homes, we've lost touch with food.

0:11:23.856,0:11:26.773
This is an experiment I did on three lettuces.

0:11:26.773,0:11:29.411
Who keeps lettuces in their fridge?

0:11:29.411,0:11:32.987
Most people. The one on the left

0:11:32.987,0:11:34.440
was kept in a fridge for 10 days.

0:11:34.440,0:11:36.659
The one in the middle, on my kitchen table. Not much difference.

0:11:36.659,0:11:39.234
The one on the right I treated like cut flowers.

0:11:39.234,0:11:41.416
It's a living organism, cut the slice off,

0:11:41.416,0:11:42.859
stuck it in a vase of water,

0:11:42.859,0:11:46.407
it was all right for another two weeks after this.

0:11:46.407,0:11:48.366
Some food waste, as I said at the beginning,

0:11:48.366,0:11:50.198
will inevitably arise, so the question is,

0:11:50.198,0:11:52.396
what is the best thing to do with it?

0:11:52.396,0:11:53.902
I answered that question when I was 15.

0:11:53.902,0:11:59.312
In fact, humans answered that question 6,000 years ago:

0:11:59.312,0:12:01.524
We domesticated pigs

0:12:01.524,0:12:04.296
to turn food waste back into food.

0:12:04.296,0:12:08.027
And yet, in Europe, that practice has become illegal

0:12:08.027,0:12:11.314
since 2001 as a result of the foot-and-mouth outbreak.

0:12:11.314,0:12:13.215
It's unscientific. It's unnecessary.

0:12:13.215,0:12:15.898
If you cook food for pigs, just as if

0:12:15.898,0:12:18.867
you cook food for humans, it is rendered safe.

0:12:18.867,0:12:21.427
It's also a massive saving of resources.

0:12:21.427,0:12:24.322
At the moment, Europe depends on importing

0:12:24.322,0:12:25.988
millions of tons of soy from South America,

0:12:25.988,0:12:28.874
where its production contributes to global warming,

0:12:28.874,0:12:31.474
to deforestation, to biodiversity loss,

0:12:31.474,0:12:33.921
to feed livestock here in Europe.

0:12:33.921,0:12:36.223
At the same time we throw away millions of tons

0:12:36.223,0:12:39.442
of food waste which we could and should be feeding them.

0:12:39.442,0:12:42.304
If we did that, and fed it to pigs, we would save

0:12:42.304,0:12:44.655
that amount of carbon.

0:12:44.655,0:12:47.747
If we feed our food waste which is the current

0:12:47.747,0:12:50.042
government favorite way of getting rid of food waste,

0:12:50.042,0:12:52.843
to anaerobic digestion, which turns food waste

0:12:52.843,0:12:55.147
into gas to produce electricity,

0:12:55.147,0:12:58.880
you save a paltry 448 kilograms of carbon dioxide

0:12:58.880,0:13:01.362
per ton of food waste. It's much better to feed it to pigs.

0:13:01.362,0:13:04.622
We knew that during the war. (Laughter)

0:13:04.622,0:13:08.896
A silver lining: It has kicked off globally,

0:13:08.896,0:13:10.666
the quest to tackle food waste.

0:13:10.666,0:13:14.520
Feeding the 5,000 is an event I first organized in 2009.

0:13:14.520,0:13:16.776
We fed 5,000 people all on food that otherwise

0:13:16.776,0:13:18.174
would have been wasted.

0:13:18.174,0:13:20.474
Since then, it's happened again in London,

0:13:20.474,0:13:22.607
it's happening internationally, and across the country.

0:13:22.607,0:13:24.950
It's a way of organizations coming together

0:13:24.950,0:13:28.692
to celebrate food, to say the best thing to do with food

0:13:28.692,0:13:31.499
is to eat and enjoy it, and to stop wasting it.

0:13:31.499,0:13:34.092
For the sake of the planet we live on,

0:13:34.092,0:13:37.372
for the sake of our children,

0:13:37.372,0:13:38.942
for the sake of all the other

0:13:38.942,0:13:41.390
organisms that share our planet with us,

0:13:41.390,0:13:44.431
we are a terrestrial animal, and we depend on our land

0:13:44.431,0:13:47.053
for food. At the moment, we are trashing our land

0:13:47.053,0:13:49.567
to grow food that no one eats.

0:13:49.567,0:13:52.663
Stop wasting food. Thank you very much. (Applause)

0:13:52.663,0:13:55.222
(Applause)