

Accepting the challenge to transform a global food system

Tristram Stuart is an author, speaker, campaigner and expert on the environmental and social impacts of food.

The covid-19 crisis has drawn attention to inequalities and injustices sustained by the global food system. This awakening is an opportunity to foster greater consciousness of ourselves as one species living on a finite planet, and spur collective action, says author and campaigner Tristram Stuart. The UK’s progress on food waste gives us hope.

“Companion” is my favourite word: it derives from the Latin com —“with”—and pan—“bread”. A companion is literally someone that you share food with, and cognates of this word echo through many languages. In France, a “friend” is a copain; in Spanish, a compañero; in Greek syntrophos (literally “eat-with”) is a comrade.

Sharing food as a way of building social bonds is a behaviour found in every human society, one with powerful roots that lie deep within our biological and social evolution. The 1.3bn tonnes of surplus food that we waste each year represents not just a waste of resources, but also wasted companionship. Covid-19 has brought to the fore what has been true for decades: environmental destruction and unequal access to food limits our ability to exercise good companionship with each other and the earth.

Mending a broken food system 

The food system today is not designed to feed people, let alone safeguard food resources for future generations. The principal driver of the food industry is to generate maximum short-term profit. Although focus on financial returns is not inherently wrong, without robust governance, it can be, and often is, at the expense of justice and ecological health. This is evident in practices such as the destruction of swathes of the Amazon rainforest to produce large quantities of beef for western consumers, and the waste of perfectly good food because it doesn’t conform to cosmetic standards.

Large food corporations have called for a boost to global food production in order to meet the demand caused by growing populations. Doubling food production of course doubles profits, yet what of the cost of irreversible soil erosion, pollution, increased levels of greenhouse gases and mass species extinction? Fortunately, the “need” to double food production at the cost of Earth’s life support system is not a real need at all: a third of all food is wasted, and obesity has tripled since 1975 (the latter being partly to do with exercise and the quality of the food that we eat). By recalibrating our relationship to food—by restoring good companionship—I believe that we can transform the food system.

Proof of Concept: Toast Ale 

Collective action has the power to lower impact, stimulate innovation and foster a regenerative economy. Yet, without effective global governance to prevent destructive and unjust business practices, a dangerous imbalance remains. Businesses have a unique opportunity to amplify the power of public opinion to demonstrate to governments that profit and protection are not mutually exclusive.

Toast Ale, a company that I founded, takes responsibility to combat food waste, offering an example of good companionship. We take bread that would have been wasted and turn it into beer. This cuts out the need to grow natural ingredients, reducing land use by one-third. We donate profits generated to charities helping to fix the broken food system, such as Feedback, an environmental charity that I founded. Earlier this year Toast Ale funded a system to feed over 5,000 people a day in London who were vulnerable to food insecurity as a result of the pandemic.

Toast Ale is part of a vibrant international movement to tackle food waste. Twenty years ago, when I started campaigning on food waste, there were no national or international policies to address the problem; companies swept it under the carpet, and public awareness was near zero. When I published a book, Waste: uncovering the global food scandal, a decade ago, the recommendation that I made to set a global target to halve food waste seemed a long way off. All of this has now changed.

As part of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, global leaders agreed to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12.3: to halve food waste by 2030. As a UN Champion for this goal, alongside the CEOs of Unilever, Tesco and Sodexo, the executive director of the UN Environment Programme, and others, I am proud of what we are accomplishing. As a result of vigorous public campaigning, the UK is the first country in the world to be on target to meet SDG 12.3. Owing to mass behaviour change among the British public, the UK has cut household food waste by one-third per capita.

Good companionship is resurging. I am hopeful that the human population is on the brink of another tipping point: a global awakening that will lead to economic and social transformation. The food system could become one of our greatest tools to create habitat rather than destroy it; take carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it in soil; replenish aquifers rather than deplete them; and provide healthy food for all. With the right combination of individual and collective action—framed by robust international regulation—the spirit of companionship can find a global footing.