Let's not hide behind our compost bins

Back in the Highlands, and an early and wet 25 minutes along the loch-side.

Continuing the recent religious theme, the established seven deadly or cardinal sins of the Christian church include gluttony. Gluttony, or excessive & wasteful consumption as it’s also known these days, clearly reaches beyond stuffing too much food down our gullets. One of my elite Special Research Agents has found an excellent essay in der Spiegel, by Harald Welzer, which looks at the appalling culture of waste in Western society in the context of Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whereby "everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family” and highlighting the ludicrously wide range of indulgences that we have come to take for granted as our “right”.

Returning to the specifics of food consumption, many people point to the USA as the extreme of food gluttony – rightly so, since the average US citizen consumes 3770 kcal per day, compared to the other extreme of the Democratic Republic of the Congo at 1590 kcal per day, and compared to the 2720 kcal that everyone could have if it were shared equally. In Europe we shouldn’t be complacent either – average daily consumption in Germany is 3530 kcal per day, and in UK it’s 3440. (ref 1 ref 2)

The UK and Japan apparently share the gold medal for wasting more food than any other nations on Earth, discarding 30-40% of what is produced each year (ref). Incidentally, the UK also has the world bronze medal for obesity incidence, beaten only by the US & Mexico. And all this at a time when an estimated 1 billion people are suffering from hunger and malnutrition. Virtuously putting that waste into a compost bin isn’t quite enough to redress the imbalance. And neither is the high-profile change to the European Common Fisheries Policy, by which European fishermen will, if the bureaucrats can bring themselves to allow it, in 2 years time no longer be forced to discard 50% of all the fish they have caught and killed. This is being seen as a victory for common sense, which of course it is – in the same way that persuading a clinically insane person not to throw everyone’s food out of the window is a victory for common sense.