Taste the Waste

Why do we throw away so much food and how can we stop this waste? It’s incredible but true: in the journey from farm to dining room table, more than half of all food ends up on garbage dumps, most of it even before it reaches the consumer.

European families spend about 100 billion euros on food every year, the equivalent of the annual sales of Nestlé, the world’s largest food corporation. The food we throw away in Europe and the United States would be enough to feed all the world’s hungry three times over. With this film we seek explanations from the staff and sales managers, bakers, wholesale market inspectors, welfare recipients, government ministers, farmers and EU bureaucrats. We are all part of the system: supermarkets make a constant selection of the goods supplied, the bread on their shelves must stay fresh until late in the evening and has to look perfect. Withered lettuce leaves, damaged potatoes, bruised apples-–none of these are tolerated.

The fact that any type of food is available at any hour of the day and time of the year is one of the biggest problems, whether it’s a question of exotic fruit for import or bread fresh from the oven just ten minutes before closing time. Not to mention edible products disposed of on account of sell-by dates that ought to be longer than they are at present.

Insofar as it requires energy, fertilizers and land, agriculture is responsible for more than a third of all the world’s greenhouse gases. Moreover, every time food rots on a garbage dump, the methane leaks into the atmosphere with an effect 25 times more potent than that of carbon dioxide. In other words, food waste has a disastrous impact on the global climate.