Dumped in landfill or burnt: enough good food for 7 bn meals

Just a tiny percentage of the £750m subsidy for waste plants would help alleviate the daily battle for millions of struggling families, reports David Cohen

- David Cohen

A STAGGERING 2.9 million tons of good-to-eat farm produce is being dumped in landfill, incinerated or sent to waste treatment plants that produce biogas as soaring numbers of people go hungry nationwide, an Evening Standard investigation reveals.

These mountains of edible farm products including carrots, courgettes, mushrooms, cauliflowers, lettuce, potatoes, onions, apples, pears and oranges - are enough to provide the equivalent of seven billion meals a year. What makes this waste especially egregious is that it comes at a time of record need nationwide, with 13.7 million people, including four million children, experiencing food insecurity in the summer, according to the Food Foundation, a figure that has more than doubled since 2020. The scale of discarded farm produce is laid bare in a report called Hidden Waste, published last year by the World Wide Fund for Nature, which exposes how 9,600 square kilometres of land, the equivalent of almost half the land in Wales, is used to produce perfectly good food that will never get sent for human consumption.

While some farm waste is inevitable - due to over-production, weather variability, fluctuations in demand and rejection of produce for cosmetic reasons such as wonky carrots - it is what happens next that is cause for concern.

Instead of being used to feed the hungry, surplus food is bulldozed and left to rot, or used for animal feed, or sent to landfill or anaerobic digestion plants to produce biogas.

This month, Britain's two largest food redistribution charities, FareShare and the Felix Project, report surging demand for food from charities and schools they are unable to satisfy mostly due to an acute shortage of surplus food. FareShare said it has 1,500 charities, schools, community groups and faith organisations on its waiting list while the Felix Project has 618.