In
today’s Sweden it is estimated that one out of every five grocery bags brought
home from the store is thrown away, according to research conducted by
Lantmannen. Why? Because we lack food literacy. The modern shopping experience
is confusing and often leads us to bring home a number of things we didn’t
expect to purchase. Moreover, we don’t often know how to take care of the
familiar things. My roommate habitually throws away milk at midnight if the
carton has reached its best-before date. What kind of culture has produced
people who believe that the numbers on a carton hold some magical power over
the contents, can reveal the secrets of food’s quality and freshness better
than our own noses and taste buds can? We fetishize best-before dates while
discounting our own experiences and the knowledge given by our senses.
The
way that we waste food, the carefree way in which we throw away milk, allow
vegetables to rot in our crisper drawers, cook more than we can eat and let the
leftovers go to the dumpster, is a symptom of a wider problem, a disconnection
from nature and our rootedness to the planet. David Suzuki writes in his book The Sacred Balance about the importance
of soil, and the shrinking availability of arable soil (148). Soil is
priceless, he writes. The food that grows on this soil should also be
priceless, yet in a country like Sweden, it clearly is not.
Suzuki
also talks about recognizing the interconnectedness and immense beauty of all
species, and about how unfamiliar we have become with our local environments.
This unfamiliarity also breeds the trends that lead to food waste. As well he
talks about the changes that have happened in so short a span of time in the
West, after the war (page). Seldom have we been so unaware of where our food
comes from. It is grown far away, often in lands that were ravaged, with
ancient forests cut down to provide more land to raise cattle and soybeans. We
eat exotic fruits almost without a second thought. Oranges were once a special
treat reserved for celebrations in the shortest days of the year, and tomatoes
and strawberries a delicacy worth waiting the whole year for. Now we ship them
from far away, buy them and throw them away. Increased food literacy would mean
understanding the environmental costs behind food, and respecting the food’s
life, its natural source in the environment, as Suzuki urges us to do
throughout The Sacred Balance.
How
are we, as a community, to minimize food waste? Here are a few simple
proposals, some a greater challenge than others, all aimed towards long-term results.
1) The popularity of community gardens has skyrocketed in recent years, but as
Suzuki notes, those who are introduced to nature at a young age are more likely
to pursue this connection as adults (45). Therefore, I propose that not only
should all towns in Sweden offer the possibility of community gardens to
adults, but also vegetable gardening must be introduced as a mandatory part of
the primary school curriculum, with plots set aside on the school grounds.
Teach children early where their food comes from and show them that we are
capable of raising it ourselves, what a miracle! We are nearing the end of the
UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-14) and this proposal
is one way of meeting the goal of “having a different vision of the world.” The
UN paper states that educational programs must be reoriented and have the goals
of building public understanding and providing practical training. An elementary
school gardening curriculum meets these goals perfectly. 2) Taxes should be
introduced on foods shipped from abroad at great environmental cost, and on
foods with intensive farming practices. It should become a clear choice for
consumers to choose locally raised organic beef, rather than beef raised abroad
or raised on intensively farmed soy that was grown in the rainforests. As Marta
Cullberg-Weston argues, it takes regulation to make change, in some cases. 3)
Finally, a systemic change in our relationship to food must come about. We must
stop thinking about food as a commodity owned by big processors and chain
stores and see it as an intimate part of our relationship with the earth,
something to be nurtured and respected, not bought and sold to the highest
bidder.
