Debate Article

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.