Let's think with our heads instead of our stomachs

What­ever your eth­nic­ity or the lan­guage you speak, whether left, right, tall or stu­pid, there is one thing we all share: the need to eat. Food is a vital re­source only edged off top spot by water. You can sleep on the floor, sur­vive with no roof, do with­out sex (tell me about it!) or never see an­other Barça match, but if you do not in­gest nu­tri­ents within a cer­tain lim­ited time (40 days is about the max­i­mum, I think) it is game over as an in­di­vid­ual and a species.

Which makes our blasé at­ti­tude to food all the more un­for­give­able. We have just come through a fes­tive pe­riod in which food plays a key role, when we stuff our­selves with ed­i­ble lux­u­ries until we lit­er­ally can't get any more into our stom­achs. Obe­sity, and its at­ten­dant prob­lems like (avoid­able) Type 2 Di­a­betes, is run­ning ram­page through our so­ci­ety, and is a di­rect con­se­quence of the over­con­sump­tion of processed foods. Yet, one of the most far-reach­ing con­se­quences of us tak­ing food for granted is the thou­sands of kilos of per­fectly ed­i­ble prod­ucts that are wasted every day.

You can read the ex­tent of food waste in our re­port that be­gins on page 20. There, you can find out about how much of the food we buy ends up in the bin, about how our econ­omy en­cour­ages over­pro­duc­tion, about how aes­thetic con­sid­er­a­tions lead to en­tire fields of pro­duce never being har­vested but left to rot. You can also find out about what all of us can do to cut down on the food we waste and how our shop­ping habits can help to turn the tide.

I don't think it is some­thing we need to feel guilty about. Given the na­ture of the con­sumer so­ci­ety we find our­selves im­mersed in and given our so­ci­ety's knack for pro­duc­ing pros­per­ity, it is un­der­stand­able that we have come to un­think­ingly treat food as if it were a cheap un­lim­ited re­source. How­ever, once we know the truth, think about it and be­come more ed­u­cated about it, then it be­comes our oblig­a­tion to act in a more re­spon­si­ble man­ner. We have be­come used to leav­ing every­thing to pow­er­ful in­sti­tu­tions and de­spair at what we can do to change things. Yet, the issue of food waste is some­thing we have a say over. As con­sumers, our habits di­rectly dic­tate the be­hav­iour of the au­thor­i­ties and big busi­ness. It may be the only power left to us, so let's not waste that, too.