LONDON, Jan 19 — There were many rules around the house when I was a child growing up in Ipoh: “Make your bed every morning”, “Wash your own dishes”, “Don’t read during meals.” Then, the funniest: “Eat everything on your plate or (and we’ve all heard this before) your future husband will have a face potholed with pimples."
I never believed it, of course, but I learnt my lesson when my parents took me for a high-tea buffet — scones slathered with cream and strawberry jam, chocolate and kaya melting over toasty waffles, colourful selections of cakes, jellies and ice-creams.
“Don’t take more than you can eat,” my mother warned.
Brimming with the hubris of childhood, however, I came back to the table with my hands full. My mother said nothing. An hour later, a cheesecake and an apple tart still sat untouched on my white porcelain plate. Eyes down, I continued chipping away.
My father noticed my growing discomfort. “Don’t make her finish it,” he said to my mother. “She’ll vomit and be sick.”
My mother, bless her, practised tough love. Well, I didn’t get sick. And so I learnt.
As I grew up, these rules slowly fell away, replaced by other rules: “No drugs”, “No drinking”, “No boyfriends.” The rules that apply to us as children don’t apply to us as young adults, just as they don’t apply to us (at least, not absolutely) when we’re “proper” adults. I started leaving my vegetables to go cold again, and I went through a short phase of being obsessively selective about what I put in my mouth, as girls tend to in all-female boarding schools.
Then I was 22, backpacking through Central America, and I was made acutely aware that it was flagrantly insensitive to waste food in places where meat is a treat, and where siblings fight for the largest portion.
I would force myself to eat everything when I was invited to local homes, even though I disliked their staple of refried black beans. There, too, a grandmother I knew once tried to save some bananas that were bruised black by dipping them in chocolate and freezing them uncovered since she had no money for plastic wrap or foil.
I don’t know how long they were in the freezer before she offered me one, but I accepted it, sure that my Malaysian gut could take it. Later, I fell so sick I had to stay in bed for days. I was the only one.
In the end, a balance has to be drawn between eating healthily and hygienically while saving food from going to waste, and the Feeding the 5000 campaign does just that.
One Friday last November, at London’s Trafalgar Square, hundreds of volunteers dished out 5,000 bowls of free curry — a mishmash of cauliflowers, carrots and potatoes which would otherwise have gone to landfills — in just two hours as part of an event organised by Tristram Stuart (author of “Waste: Uncovering The Global Food Scandal”) and food-redistribution charities such as FareShare, FoodCycle and Love Food Hate Waste.
The aim was to highlight the indefensibility of throwing away so much food when so many in the world go hungry, especially when easy solutions exist. The curry wasn’t “real” curry, but still a yummy — though benign — British take.
The organisers of Feeding5k likely thought, quite rightly, that this wouldn’t pass muster with most of the public, though Tristram Stuart is himself a freegan; besides, it is illegal — a woman was charged with “theft by finding”, for which prison is a possible sentence.
Feeding5k also made sure that no one went thirsty. Several tonnes of apples were pressed onsite and served as juice, the leftover pulp fed to pigs that had been transplanted to the Square in a makeshift pen. The message was clear: why grow food especially for livestock when we can feed them what we can’t consume?
Since 2001, due to fears of the transmission of food-and-mouth disease, EU law has banned the feeding of catering and domestic food waste and food waste that might contain animal by-products of any nature to pigs. As such, European livestock feed on a poncy diet of 40 million tonnes of soya imported annually from South America, which contributes to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and wildlife habitat.
Shocking as all this is, commercial food wastage is only half the story. UK households throw away a quarter of all the food they buy, and official figures estimate household waste to make up about half the UK’s total food waste, of which about 60 per cent — 4,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools — is avoidable due to buying or preparing too much in the first place.
Such waste habits are exacerbated by the growing trend of online grocery shopping and hassle-free time-appointed, to-your-door delivery (guilty), and irresistible 2-for-1 discounts on food close to expiring (also guilty).
We tend to buy more food than we need, preferring leftovers to the embarrassment of not having enough to feed the family or dinner party. There’s always the freezer, but we often forget until it’s too late, and it’s a bother to have to wait for meat to defrost when you’ve just come home and you’re hungry.
Celebrity chefs have also come under fire for encouraging consumer food wastage by championing the freshest ingredients for home cooking. With the proliferation of gastronomic reality TV, people are fed the fantasy of being a Nigella Lawson or a Gordon Ramsay: cooking something different every day, adding something exotic to a traditional recipe… but in reality, jobs and families get in the way, and sometimes, it only makes sense to eat the same thing over a few days.
In response, popular UK chefs including Thomasina Miers of Mexican market-style restaurant Wahaca, BBC-featured chef Valentine Warner, and Arthur Potts Dawson of The People’s Supermarket were on hand for "live" cooking demonstrations at Trafalgar Square, offering up ideas for making meals out of leftovers and bits of meat such as heart, lungs and offal often discarded by butchers, proving that being economical doesn’t have to be boring.
Why should you care? Because rich countries waste about a third of the world’s entire food supply, and this has repercussions on the global food economy. Such large-scale wasting of food inflates food prices everywhere, contributing to global hunger, not to mention its many harmful effects on the environment. Tristram Stuart puts this into perspective: “[I]f we could hypothetically save all the food wasted across the UK on any one day, there would be enough to feed 60 million people (i.e. the entire nation) and still leave some over for tea-time.”
And it’s not just the rich countries. In Malaysia, where eating out is relatively affordable, it seems that wasting food is something we do easily and thoughtlessly too. The Star reported earlier this year that Malaysians discard about 930 tonnes of unconsumed food daily, equivalent to throwing away 93,000 10kg bags of rice every day.
I suppose the one thing that might alleviate our conscience is our takeaway culture (though perhaps not the plastic boxes we take with us). At home, we ta pau everything, even leftover bones for our canine pets. In Britain, if you’re not in Chinatown, takeaway just isn’t done — I suppose because it’s seen as crass, cheap.
One English Feeding5k volunteer bucked conformity, however. Speaking at the "live" cooking tent, she recalled dining out once when she noticed that the patrons on the next table were asking for their bill when they’d hardly touched their food. Overhearing the waiter ask if they wanted to bag their leftovers and their demurral because they were headed to a party, she, to the alleged embarrassment of her companion, asked if she could have their leftovers instead.
All things considered, Feeding5k has definitely made me examine my eating habits, and be more mindful of food wastage but I wouldn’t go that far.
