Taste the Waste

More than half of our food ends up in the garbage. Most of it on the way from the field to the dining table, before it even reaches us consumers: every second lettuce, every second potato and every fifth loaf of bread. The extent of the waste is clear to a few. Nobody likes throwing away food - but everyone goes along with the big throw-away mentality! Filmmaker Valentin Thurn has uncovered the reality in our garbage cans. In the dumpsters of wholesale stores, supermarkets and those in front of our homes. They contain masses of perfectly good food, some still in their original packaging, often not even past their sell-by date. More than ten million tons of food are thrown away every year in Germany alone. And the numbers are growing! Why do we throw so much away? In search of explanations, Valentin Thurn talks to supermarket salespeople and managers, bakers, wholesale market inspectors, ministers, psychologists, farmers and EU bureaucrats. What he finds is a system in which we all participate: supermarkets offer a full range of goods. The bread has to be fresh on the shelves until late in the evening, and strawberries are available all year round. And everything has to look perfect: one withered leaf of lettuce, a crack in the potato or a dent in the apple, and the goods are immediately sorted out. Yoghurt cups two days before the best-before date. The fact that we waste half of our food has a devastating effect on the global climate. Agriculture is responsible for more than a third of greenhouse gases; growing food consumes energy and fertilizer and destroys more and more rainforests. When food rots in the garbage dump, additional methane gas escapes, which has 25 times the global warming effect of carbon dioxide. Our wastefulness also exacerbates global hunger. The rising wheat prices prove it: Nowadays, we buy our food on the same world market where developing countries also buy. If we threw away less, we would have to buy less; prices would fall and there would be more for the hungry. But there are other ways! Valentin Thurn finds people around the world who want to stop the insane waste: the Austrian “garbage divers” Gerhard and Robert, for example, who salvage food from supermarket dumpsters. Thomas Pocher, a French supermarket director, who wants to persuade his customers to buy less climate-damaging products. American anthropologist Timothy Jones, who brings consumers and farmers together, and Viennese researcher Felicitas Schneider, who takes apart household and supermarket garbage cans and uses her findings to do some convincing. Small steps, but together they offer a great opportunity: if we were to reduce our food waste by half, it would have the same effect on the global climate as if we did without one in every two cars.