Food Waste and Food Distribution

Paul Girvan Excerpts

Tuesday 16th April 2024 Westminster Hall

[Paul Girvan (South Antrim) (DUP)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz. I thank the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Jo Gideon) for securing this debate.

I want to take two different lines. One is the household; many people have made reference to the amount of food waste generated within the home. I will give a small example of what is happening. Many community groups in my constituency have identified that homes are under tremendous pressure, not just from the cost of living; their budgets are being squeezed in every way. These groups have made efforts to bring people together to educate those in the home who are cooking, providing and doing the shopping on how they can prepare meals and generate a shopping list.

Unfortunately, the way in which our supermarkets are laid out is not necessarily helpful. We used to walk into a shop with a list, and we would get what we wanted from behind the counter. Now we walk around the shop and everything is put out to tempt us to say, “Well, I think I need this.” Whenever I go shopping, my wife always says that it costs us twice as much as whenever she does it. My eyes are always bigger than my belly, and unfortunately I decide that certain things are needed when, to be truthful, they are not.

A number of community groups in my area have been running programmes where they are bringing people in, and are learning them how to put together a menu and to shop for a week. We have already heard that almost 70% of food waste is generated in the home and about how we can deal with that. We produce almost 11 million tonnes of food waste in the United Kingdom. That predominately goes to landfill, producing methane. There are other ways to deal with that waste rather than sending it to landfill. We can recover energy from our food waste by using technology.

Worldwide, 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted. Much of that is down to lifestyle and how we have learned to be a consumable society; and, as a consequence, we produce far more food than we could ever usefully use. My hon. Friend the Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said that whenever he was young, the shop would look at whatever was left and see what was close to its end—not its sell-by date, because sometimes the sell-by date does not mean the food cannot be consumed.

Food used to be more local; we are now a global market, and our food comes from all over the world. That contributes to part of the problem because we have created different tastes within our society, including people wanting to eat certain foods that are not produced locally. We used to eat berries that were only produced at certain times of the year. Now we want them all year, so they have to be brought in. We have generated a consumable society that is fuelled by what we have on our shelves.

It is important that we put measures in place. The Food Waste (Reduction) Bill was introduced to Westminster in 2015. Certain parts of that legislation have been mentioned this morning. There are parts we want to encourage, and the large retailers have taken a lead in many areas. We should support them totally; on many occasions, they are ahead of what we are attempting to do as legislators. Certain measures should be brought in, including tax breaks for those who are efficient and do not produce much waste. That has to be considered as an opportunity.

Generally, we should be encouraging the housewife—maybe that is the wrong term to use—or those who are cooking in the home to be far more efficient about what they put on the table and what they do whenever they go out shopping, and ensure that we do not buy more than we can consume. That message will go back. I want to thank those charities that have been so successful in putting forward the FareShare scheme and the food reduction system. The Too Good To Go scheme is also fantastic; I was unaware of it until recently. I again thank the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central for securing this debate.

[Several hon. Members rose—]