An Armageddon too good to waste

Armageddon - so, it wasn't Bruce Willis' best film, but you had to love the rough neck meets space meets meteor meets Armageddon thing. So I guess it's fair enough that journalists this week have built their coverage of the ongoing food crisis - and last week's Beddington report   - on it. Unexpected threat looms out of the deep unknown to threaten all mankind (sic), and it's up to the embodiment of science and knowledge (NASA) to throw the mother of all techno-fixes at the rock to Save Us All.

 Except none of that's really true. There has been a food crisis going for nigh-on 40 years. It's both well documented and well understood. And while the likes of Monsanto would really love us to believe we need to throw all kinds of high-tech (and profitable) solutions at the problem like GM, we don't really need better technology to fix the problem. Most of the solutions involve both better use of the resources we have, and transitioning to a fairer food system.

Making the food system fairer is a big project, but by making sure we use our resources more wisely in the global North (where we consume 80% of the worlds resources), we'll be making a good start on what has to be one of the most important political projects of the next century. We've been campaigning to change the livestock system in the UK, and now in Europe, for the last few years. Changing the way we produce meat and dairy, and reducing our consumption of both is vital. But one other easy place to start to make a difference is by addressing what we produce but don't use: waste.

The amount of food-waste generated in the UK is huge - there are an estimated 20 million tonnes of food wasted in Britain from the plough to the plate each year. Of this amount, 65 per cent - 8.3 million tons - is generated by UK households who throw away one quarter of all the food they buy. Just the meat we waste alone requires land almost the size of the Peak District to produce.

Households throw out over 800,000 tonnes of meat and dairy annually, or enough to fill 775 trucks every day. Add to that the waste produced on the farm, in manufacturing and retailing meat and dairy and you start to get a sense of the scale of the problem. The Beddington report itself states that halving the amount of food waste we generate in the UK "could reduce the food required by 2050 by an amount approximately equal to 25% of today's production" - no small amount.

Even if we were producing sustainable meat and dairy and even if we were consuming far less than we are now, this would still be a massive problem. In a finite world, we just don't have the luxury of chucking out a quarter of all the food we buy, especially as food price rises are driving even more people to desperation and hunger.

There are a range of things households, business and Government can do right now to reduce food waste. From simply planning meals to improving manufacturing and changing retail practices to improving or introducing legislation: we don't lack for options. It's not a problem that requires an expert techno-fix - actually, a lot of the solution is just reintroducing common sense into our food system. By reducing our waste we can make a start at fixing our food chain and ending the food crisis.