Food Is Wasted - Documenting the issue of food waste

Oddbox is a London-based box scheme that works directly with farmers and growers to take their wonky and surplus produce – so food that might otherwise have gone to waste -  then deliver them straight to their members’ doors at a price that’s fair for both the farmer and their members.

I spoke to Emilie and Deepak - the two founders of the company, about how they started off, how they sourced their produce, what they’ve witnessed, and what they feel needs to be done to make a more sustainable food system. As we discuss, it’s evident that things need to change, and that despite lots of noise being created by supermarkets around the issue of food waste, they unfortunately are unlikely to lead that change.

It was a great chat, and they give some really valuable insights as to why there is a vital need for the work they are doing, and others that are motivated not by the bottom-line, but by the desire to create positive change in a sustainable manner, and through a long-term approach to providing people access to seasonal, nutritious, affordable food.

This episode is also available as a video, which you can watch via the Food Is Wasted YouTube Channel – go to http://foodiswasted.com/youtube and you’ll see this, and all the other videos produced so far.

If you want to learn more about Oddbox, you can visit their website at http://oddbox.co.uk

And as always, please be sure to share the podcast and video with anyone you feel might be interested.

To find out more about the issue of food waste and people and organisations fighting to reduce is, visit the Food Is Wasted website - http://foodiswasted.com

In this episode of the Food Is Wasted podcast, I’ll be speaking to Christina O’Sullivan from Feedback – a London-based organisation running several campaigns related to food waste – such as the Gleaning Network and the Pig Idea – both of which feature on the Food Is Wasted website.

Feedback recently published a report called ‘The Food Waste Scorecard’, authored by Christina, which ranked the 10 biggest supermarkets in the UK according to their performance in reducing food waste.

The supermarkets were ranked using available data against the food use hierarchy, which requires that prevention be the priority towards tackling waste. You can see visual of the hierarchy in the show notes,

Tesco came out top of the rankings, having adopted measures including the publishing of third party audited food waste data – the first supermarket to do so. Signing up to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 12.3, of halving food waste from farm to fork by 2030 – again the first supermarket to do so. As well as being, committed to extending transparency to include measurement of food waste in its supply chain.

At the bottom of the rankings was Waitrose, which has done very little in terms of transparency and action. Hopefully the publication of this report, and the publicity it’s getting, will motivate them to act more responsibly.

There’s a huge room for improvement from all supermarkets, and really there needs to be policy written by government to push for more meaningful and sustained action by all supermarkets – voluntary targets, such as those set out in the Courtauld Commitment 2025, are evidently not sufficient.

You can download a copy of the report via the link in the show-notes – go to http://foodiswasted.com/podcasts and navigate to the page for this podcast.

Before we launch into the interview, if you would like to receive future interviews as I publish them, then please subscribe to the podcast, and please also ­leave a rating or review – all of which will help ensure more people get to learn about the people and organisations I document, and the great work they are doing to reduce avoidable food waste.

Also, this interview is available as a video, which you can watch on the Food Is Wasted website, or on YouTube – just go to http://foodiswasted.com/youtube and you’ll be taken to the YouTube channel.

You can visit Feedback's website at http://feedbackglobal.org

When I was over in Copenhagen last year for a few days, I got in touch with Selina Juul – founder of the organisation Stop Wasting Food - to see if she would be willing and able to be interviewed, and she very kindly said she was. The day we arranged to meet Selina was being interviewed and participating in a panel discussion at a national radio station, which I was able to sit in on. After which we found a suitable space to conduct this interview.

Those people who keep an eye on all things food waste will no doubt be aware of Selina and the work she does. She has achieved an incredible amount both as an individual – from speaking in front of the European Parliament and the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, to being awarded Dane of the Year in 2014 – and through the Stop Wasting Food movement, which Selina started in 2008, which itself has won many awards and contributed significantly to raising awareness and reducing food waste in Denmark, by engaging politicians, supermarkets and households. The organisation has also been a key contributor to the EU’s own resolutions against food waste.

This episode is also available as a video, which you can watch on YouTube at foodiswasted.com/youtube

If you would like to read about and see what I’ve witnessed while documenting the issue over the past few years – in cities and on farms across Europe, then visit the Food Is Wasted website at foodiswasted.com

You can find out more about the work Selina and her organisation does at stopwastingfoodmovement.org

In this episode I speak to some of the children who run the social enterprise Bubble and Squeak, at their school in West London - selling surplus food in the school playground and to the local community.

The initiative is led by around 400 children aged 5 to 12 years old, and aims to take edible surplus food such as fruit and vegetables from local businesses, markets and supermarkets, to then redistribute it to the local community on a ‘pay as you feel’ basis.  

I visited the children at their school just before they were about to start a crowdfunding campaign last year, which ended up being very successful, to hear their thoughts about food waste and details of the work they are doing. I then spoke to Lidia, their teacher and one of the project leads for Bubble and Squeak, who shares more about how the social enterprise works, and the impact it’s having. 

If you would like to find out more about the work the kids are doing, you can visit their site at http://bubblesqueakeat.com.

If you would like to learn more about the issue of food waste, and about people and organisations that are working to reduce it, then please visit the Food Is Wasted website at http://foodiswasted.com, and subscribe to the newsletter to be kept up to date on new podcasts, articles and visual content.

This podcast is a brief interview I conducted with the chef Tom Hunt. Tom is not just an award-winning chef and restaurant owner, but also a food writer, sustainability consultant and campaigner, as well as author of the book The Natural Cook.

Tom's response to the issue of food waste is to promote what he calls 'Root to Fruit Eating', which we touch upon briefly in the interview, and which entails – eating for pleasure, eating whole foods, and eating the best food you can.

I met up with Tom at a recent event he was hosting and talking at here in London, in collaboration with the Thomson Reuters Foundation. It was a very last-minute interview, so I had almost no time to prepare, but it was a great opportunity to learn more about Tom's work and philosophy on the topic of food waste.

You can find out more about Tom and his work at http://tomsfeast.com

For more podcasts, articles and photos of people and organisations working to reduce the amount of edible food needlessly going to waste, visit the Food Is Wasted website - http://foodiswasted.com

In this episode, I'm speaking to Travis Andren from Seedling in Philadelphia, in the United States - an organisation working on bringing efficient forms of urban-based, vertical farming and aquaponics into the mainstream.

A lot of the focus on reducing avoidable food waste is placed on the household, or changing supermarket practices, all of which are important in addressing the flaws in the current system. But what if a new agricultural system was introduced to reduce the dependency on the depleted soils of rural land - one that feeds our ever-growing cities from within the cities themselves, and essentially eliminates the potential for food waste by avoiding food losses, allowing for a diversity of secondary markets, and as a last resort - say if there is a crop failure - using the food to produce energy to sustain the system.

That's exactly what Seedling aims to do - to create a source of locally produced food for retailers, academic institutions, and the catering and hospitality industries, with a minimal impact on the environment. The nature of this type of farming not only reduces the amount of avoidable food waste being produced, but provides a more efficient, lower-impact means of feeding cities.

I talk to Travis about the viability of vertical farming, the impact it has compared to conventional, rural-based agriculture, and much more.

Visit the Seedling site for more info - http://www.seedling-phl.com

Visit the Food Is Wasted website for more information on food waste and initiatives to try and reduce it - http://foodiswasted.com

In this episode I'm speaking to Pete Pearson - Director of food waste at the World Wildlife Fund’s US offices.

WWF is an international NGO working in over 100 countries - focusing on conservation and minimising the impact we humans have on the environment, and the other animals with whom we share this planet.

Since 2015 they've been devoting resources to a campaign to reduce food waste, resulting in initiatives both commercial and educational in focus.

I discuss with Pete the evolution of the campaign, the willingness of businesses to engage with the them and the issue, as well as the impact of government policy and much more.

Since the interview was conducted there has been the launch of a series of pilot projects aimed at further reducing food waste in the hotel industry - being carried out in co-operation with The Rockefeller Foundation and the American Hotel and Lodging Association.

If you would like to be kept up to date on new interviews and articles on the site, as well as discounts for the new shop - where I'm selling prints of my work - the profits from which will go to helping fund the project, and allow me to spend more time documenting the activities of organisations fighting to reduce avoidable food waste. So please check out the shop at http://foodiswasted.com/shop and sign up to the newsletter at http://foodiswasted.com/newsletter

In this episode I'm speaking to Cristina Reni from Food for Soul - an organisation based in Italy, set up by the chef Massimo Bottura, who runs the number one restaurant in the world.

The organisation aims to encourage public and private organisations to create community kitchens around the world, and was created after Massimo was involved in setting up a soup kitchen in an abandoned theatre during the Expo 2015 in Milan, feeding vulnerable members of the community using food left over from the Expo each day, rescuing it from going to waste. He was involved with a similar initiative at the Rio Olympics in 2016.

Thanks to the work of Food for Soul, these soup kitchens - or refettorios - are still up and running, and it's recently been announced that they will be opening a refettorio in London this June, during London Food Month.

I spoke to Cristina, who is a project manager at Food for Soul about how the organisation functions, the impact it’s having, and much more.

Just a say that this was the first time I had carried out an interview via Skype, and I was also starting to come down with a cold, so I'm not the most dynamic in this interview unfortunately, but Cristina more than makes up for that with her passion and enthusiasm for the great work that Food for Soul is doing.

If you would like to learn more about the work Food for Soul is doing, visit their website at - http://foodforsoul.it

If you would like to learn more about the issue of food waste and the work being done by organisations like Food for Soul, then be sure to visit the Food Is Wasted website at http://foodiswasted.com - and sign up for the newsletter if you would like to be kept informed of new articles, interviews and initiatives.

If you’re involved with a food waste relate initiative, and would like to be featured on the site or podcast, please get in touch with me via email at [email protected]

In this episode I'm speaking to Sophie from Elysia - a new start-up social enterprise which buys food that would otherwise have gone to waste from various local, artisan suppliers at a discounted rate, and uses them to create meals to order, as well as catering for events.

I caught up with Sophie during one such event, and she shared with me the story behind Elysia, how it functions, and the impact her company is having on reducing avoidable food waste.

Then we met up a second time when she was meeting with chef Emily Roux, daughter of Michel Roux Jr, who has been providing Sophie with mentorship and support in developing her dishes.

I spoke to Emily about her experiences as a chef in relation to food waste both here in the UK, and in France, and what she has gained and learnt about the issue from her work with Sophie.

Sophie has been very kind to provide listeners of the podcast with a discount on their first purchase from Elysia, details of which I will share at the end of the recording.

Elysia - http://elysiacatering.com

Articles, interviews and videos on food waste  - http://foodiswasted.com

In this episode I'm speaking to Margaret Ritchie MP - Member of Parliament for South Down in Northern Ireland, and a member of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee.

In the previous episode I'd said I would be publishing a second SOS NI podcast, which shared the stories of the staff and volunteers, and the organisations they support, but it's taking me longer to piece together than I'd hoped, and because I've been recording other interviews at the same time I didn't want to delay getting them published any longer. So that’s why you'll be listening to an interview with Margaret Ritchie instead of the SOS NI crew, and there might be one or two more published ahead of that episode, but I will hopefully have it sorted in a few weeks time.

So the background to this interview - I contacted Margaret after reading her conversation on Twitter with the organisation Feedback - telling about a grocer who had been told by a local official that he couldn't sell cosmetically imperfect produce.

Margaret sits on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee which is currently investigating the issue of food waste, and will be reporting on it later in the year. I will put links in the show notes to the recordings of representatives of the supermarkets and others giving testimony to the committee.

It's a brief interview, which took place in a busy café for MPs in the heart of the Houses of Parliament, and explores the work of the committee as well as what lies ahead, and the potential for new legislation.

Read the show notes here - http://foodiswasted.com/?p=1537

Find out more about food waste on the Food Is Wasted website - http://foodiswasted.com