Food waste is the climate crisis no one wants to stop

One winter morning, a headteacher texted me at dawn: “We have no milk. No cereal. Nothing for the breakfast club.” At that very moment, my team was unloading supermarket pallets piled with perfectly good yoghurt, bread and fruit that had been rescued only hours

- TAZ KHAN

One winter morning, a headteacher texted me at dawn: "We have no milk. No cereal. Nothing for the breakfast club." At that very moment, my team was unloading supermarket pallets piled with perfectly good yoghurt, bread and fruit that had been rescued only hours from destruction. We transported it to the school and, by 8am, 200 children had eaten.

That is the moral contradiction of our age: children in Britain starting school hungry while edible food is destroyed at scale because our systems make waste cheaper than compassion. The mass wastage of food in a country where hunger is rising is Britain's quietest scandal. It is also one of the most overlooked drivers of the climate crisis.

Recent figures from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) highlight the scale of Britain's food waste crisis. An estimated 10.7 million tonnes of food valued at around £17bn is discarded each year across farms, factories, shops, restaurants and homes. Break that down and it works out at roughly £1,000 of wasted food for an average family of four.