Here we look at; How Feedback Global Work; a Vision for the Food System; Global Campaigns; and, Ways You Can Get Involved. This is part of our series on Growing Sustainably and Eating Sustainably.
If you already know that food production is the single greatest impact humans have on the environment, here are the options to help to reduce food waste:
- Learn about Feedback Global Campaigns
- Try the Sustainability Roadmap with 40+ Solutions to Climate Change
- Check out #VoteWithOurMoney with 6 Steps to Help Stop Climate Change
- Use the Company Directory to Help You Grow, Eat, and Live Sustainably
If you want some more facts before making any decisions, let’s get into the details:
Food production is the single greatest impact humans have on the environment.
- Mountains of food waste
- Habitat destruction to clear land to grow animal feed for factory farms
- Soil depletion leaving future harvests at risk
The food system needs to change!
Founded in 2013, Feedback Global combines investigative research, mass public participation feasts (made entirely out of food that would otherwise have been wasted!), and on the ground pilots for a better food system.
As a result, Feedback Global put food issues, in particular waste, at the very top of the business and policy agendas.
Why? Because our food system is dysfunctional:
- Using too many limited natural resources
- Producing too much waste
- Producing too much pollution
It doesn’t have to be this way.
We can secure nutritious and delicious food for everyone, without trashing our planet.
How Feedback Global Work
Moving towards a food system that nourishes both people and our planet requires significant changes to our food culture, the food economy, and its governance.
Feedback Global aims to bring about these changes through campaigning, advocacy, citizen engagement, and pilot programmes.
It’s about exposing systemic problems and acting as a critical friend to industry and policy makers or, when more appropriate, launching creative campaigns to achieve the changes that are needed—like their campaigns on food marketing and supermarket food waste.
Vision for the Food System
The wasteful and high impact practises used by ‘Big Food’ are driving deforestation, draining freshwater reserves, exhausting our soils, and account for more than a quarter of our global greenhouse gas bill!
This gets worse when we consider that around a third of all food produced worldwide is wasted.
It’s a dangerously reckless approach to feeding the world–and it can’t last.
Quite simply, food production driven by profit is destroying our chances of feeding ourselves in the future.
The food system model that Feedback Global has proposed is already used far and wide by many organisations!
Here is the food system model developed by Carina Millstone for Feedback (2017).
Our Current Food System
The current, linear food system, requires huge quantities of resources to grow, process, and transport our food.
It wastes a vast amount in the process (around a THIRD of food produced is wasted around the world).
Our current food system is constantly growing, requiring more resources, including land, and further encroaching on the natural world.
And yet we don’t need a bigger food system to feed everyone fairly: we need a better one.
A Sustainable Food System
The Feedback Global vision is a circular food system that consumes fewer resources to produce food, and wastes far less food.
A defining principle of their circular food system is that food previously seen as ‘waste’ actually has value, and can be used as a resource.
This surplus food should be used to feed people.
If not, it should be repurposed to feed livestock and fish or, as a last resort, turned into compost and manure to feed the soil and grow more nutritious food.
Feeding and replenishing humans, animals, and soils is the way to create a sustainable future.
Reusing what was previously seen as ‘waste’ =
- Less waste pollution
- Less going to landfill
- Less resources needed to produce food
- Overproduction and relentless growth are reined-in
- Land is no longer under unnecessary cultivation
- Allowing the natural environment to flourish
- Helping to regenerate our planet
You might also be interested in our piece on Growing Sustainably that covers organic farming, regenerative agriculture, and biodynamics.
Feedback Global Campaigns
A response to COVID19, bad energy, farmed fish, British sugar, food citizenship, food commons, food waste, industrial meat, new food economies, food policy: Feedback Global does a LOT of campaigning.
For this review, let’s take a look at the ones that stood out to me:
The Total Bull Campaign
In 2017, Feedback Global tackled Tesco’s ‘fake farm’ meat brands.
Why? Tesco’s bargain basement meat that happens to feature a nice-sounding farm name like ‘Woodside Farm’ doesn’t exist…
The problem:
Supermarkets are selling meat under fake farm names, deliberately encouraging consumers to believe that the meat is sourced from small-scale producers.
Behind the bucolic mirage could lie a high-intensity, unsustainable mega farm.
Tesco is not the only supermarket to use made up farm names in their branding.
Other fake farm ranges include:
- Asda’s ‘Farm Stores’ features an old-fashioned barn and tractor on the label
- Lidl’s ‘Birchwood Farm’ (marketed as ‘Strathvale Farm’ in Scotland)
- Aldi’s ‘Ashfield Farm’
- Marks and Spencer’s ‘Oakham’ chicken
The solution:
The Total Bull campaign shines a light on the biggest bull on supermarket shelves, holding food companies to account for their misleading marketing, and calling on them to support small farms.
The Supermarket Food Waste Scorecard Campaign
Supermarkets hold a lot of power in the food supply chain.
Big retailers have over 85% of the market share of grocery stores in the UK.
Feedback Global ranked the UK’s top ten supermarkets based on publicly available information on their work to reduce food waste.
The problem:
Despite many laudable initiatives to tackle food waste, supermarkets are failing to successfully reduce waste in their stores, supply chains, and customers’ homes.
Despite leadership from a few retailers, many are behind on the most basic steps to reduce food waste, such as:
- Publishing transparent data
- Converting food surplus to animal feed
No supermarket is truly getting to grips with how their marketing and sales tactics cause waste.
The solution:
We need supermarkets to step up, reduce food waste, and develop sustainable supply chains by:
- Providing transparent data on food waste across their supply chain
- Working to help people to reduce food waste
- Ensuring that unavoidable edible surplus food goes to feed people
Key Findings From the Supermarket Scorecard Report
Unfortunately, none of the supermarkets in the report got the top A grade.
No supermarkets were adequately addressing the ways that the supermarket model causes food waste in the home due to confusing, over-cautious, and unnecessary date labels.
Tesco got a B score for food waste, based on:
- The first supermarket to publish third party audited food waste data.
- The first supermarket to sign up to the Sustainable Development Goal (to halve food waste from farm to fork by 2030).
- Committed to extending transparency to include measurement of food waste in its supply chain.
- Significantly increased quantity of food redistributed to people in need; donated 7,975 tonnes in 2017 representing a 40% increase on the previous year.
- Working to help suppliers reduce food waste through initiatives such as marketing seasonal produce, creating a food waste hotline for suppliers, and whole crop Purchasing.
Waitrose were the worst performing supermarket with an F score, based on:
- Provides no public data on food waste figures.
- Redistributing small quantities of food in comparison to other retailers
- Limited work with suppliers to reduce food waste.
- No programme for sending permissible food surplus to animal feed.
- Marketing strategies that encourage over-purchase and ultimately waste.
- Failure to conduct analyses of their customer’s food waste data and use this as a baseline for household food waste strategies.
Supermarkets were failing to significantly reduce food surplus in their operations.
Aggregate data from UK supermarkets showed that progress had plateaued.
Food fit for human consumption is not being redistributed in sufficient quantities.
2017 research by WRAP showed that the amount of food redistributed from retailers and manufacturers to feed people could be increased by approximately four-fold.
Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Iceland were the only supermarkets sending permissible food surplus to be converted into animal feed.
Large quantities of food suitable for human consumption is being sent to Anaerobic Digestion (AD) to be converted into energy.
Tesco’s food waste data (the most substantial data publicly available) showed that 19,898 tonnes of food fit for human consumption went to Anaerobic Digestion (AD) in 2017/18.
The Feedback Food Waste Supermarket Scorecard:
I was surprised and disappointed to see Waitrose, Coop, and M&S at the bottom of the scorecard. I’m glad that the majority of the food I buy comes from Abel & Cole (if you want to try them you can click this link to get a discount)—the organic online supermarket—and in veg boxes from our local regenerative organic farm—Oxton Organics.
There’s a LOT more in the report so please do check it out at Supermarket food waste scorecard – Feedback.
The Feeding the 5000 Campaign
At this time of writing this review, Feedback Global and their partners had hosted over 50 Feeding the 5000 events around the world.
This campaign is about serving up a delicious communal feast for 5000 people, made entirely out of food that would otherwise have been wasted!
These events are a coalition of organisations that offer the solutions to food waste, raising the issue up the political agenda, and inspiring new local initiatives.
The problem:
Food production is the human activity with the single biggest impact on our planet.
We grow our food at a huge environmental cost.
We then waste around a third of all food produced around the world!
Food waste is a tragic loss of precious resources, such as land and water.
It’s also a serious issue contributing to the climate crisis.
The Feeding the 5000 events have put food waste on the global agenda and highlighted that we have to build a food system that nourishes the planet to be able to tackle climate change.
The solution:
No one likes to see food going to waste.
At Feeding the 5000 events the public gets to see the scale of food waste first hand and learn that the solutions are delicious.
The events bring together a coalition of organisations and engage politicians at the local and national level.
Want to organise your own event? Take a look at Feeding the 5000 – Feedback.
Ways You Can Get Involved
I love that Feedback Global include the time it takes to get involved.
Here are the quickest ways to get involved:
- Donate to support their work = Takes 30 seconds
- Subscribe to their mailing list = Takes 15 seconds
- Sign-up to the latest research and investigations = Takes 15 seconds
Learn more at Feedback Global Act Now.
Those are three very easy options.
Here are some of the higher value ways to get involved:
Divest from Big Livestock
The UK’s local councils are pouring £238 million in pension fund money into industrial livestock investments, fuelling a destructive industry.
Write to your local council takes = 30 seconds.
Stop Feeding Climate Change
If we don’t tackle food, we can’t meet important climate goals to stabilise the planet.
Tell The Government To Act Now takes = 30 seconds.
Volunteer on Farms To Save Food
Feedback Global’s Gleaning Network gives volunteers an opportunity to rescue surplus fruit and veg from farms where it would otherwise be wasted, and get it to good causes.
The problem:
Feedback Global’s research found that farmers waste around 16% of their crop before it even leaves the field or barn–often due to factors beyond their control, such as produce not being the right shape or size for supermarket tastes, or inaccurate forecasting by retailers of how much produce they will buy.
Read more about Feedback Global’s research on supply chain food waste.
The solution:
Since 2012, Feedback Global’s Gleaning Network has:
- Worked with 60 farmers, 3,000 volunteers, and numerous charities
- Rescued over 500 tonnes of fruits and vegetables that would have been wasted
Find your nearest gleaning group or start your own!
Here Is What You Can Do
- Take a look at Feedback Global
- Try the Sustainability Roadmap with 40+ Solutions to Climate Change
- Check out #VoteWithOurMoney with 6 Steps to Help Stop Climate Change
- Use the Company Directory to Help You Grow, Eat, and Live Sustainably
- Be inspired. We can help climate change if we do something about it
- Talk to your friends and colleagues
- Share this with others
Want to Continue Your Journey?
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Sources Used to Create This
Production Notes
This was produced by me, James Walters, as a personal project to help stop climate change by inspiring others to grow, eat, and live sustainably.
Any advice given is the opinion of those involved and does not constitute medical, financial, or legal advice.
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