A story in America about food waste on an epic scale
A tractor mulches green beans at an R.C. Hatton farm in Florida. “It’s heartbreaking,” an owner of the farm said. (©Rose Marie Cromwell for The New York Times)
From David Yaffe-Bellany and Michael Corkery writing for The New York Times:
After weeks of concern about shortages in grocery stores and mad scrambles to find the last box of pasta or toilet paper roll, many of the nation’s largest farms are struggling with another ghastly effect of the pandemic. They are being forced to destroy tens of millions of pounds of fresh food that they can no longer sell.
The closing of restaurants, hotels and schools has left some farmers with no buyers for more than half their crops. And even as retailers see spikes in food sales to Americans who are now eating nearly every meal at home, the increases are not enough to absorb all of the perishable food that was planted weeks ago and intended for schools and businesses.
You might might be forgiven for thinking; so what?
well here’s the so what:
The amount of waste is staggering. The nation’s largest dairy cooperative, Dairy Farmers of America, estimates that farmers are dumping as many as 3.7 million gallons of milk each day. A single chicken processor is smashing 750,000 unhatched eggs every week.
[Read the full article here: Dumped Milk, Smashed Eggs, Plowed Vegetables: Food Waste of the Pandemic]
As we contemplate, in the UK and across the globe, how we get back to “business as usual”… there is a realisation that there won’t be a business as usual like before.
From the paralysis of closure, global hospitality - underpinned by food production - is about to go through a process of slow and staggered re-openings and site mobilisations where reduced capacity and social distancing will be the new norm.
We therefore must anticipate that one of the biggest costs - both morally and fiscally - will be in the unprecedented amounts of food waste as a result of a supply chain production pipeline that has no real OFF switch - one that was set up in a time when world demand looked very, very different.
How do we as an industry come together to manage, reduce or perhaps re-direct that production to where can most effectively meet consumer demand?
