Oswestry21

A recent news article in the ‘Tizer reported that Sainsbury’s in Oswestry has started handing out free storage containers to customers to ‘help people do their bit to reduce the amount of food that goes to waste’.

      Laudable though this initiative may appear, it is somewhat ironic given the role that supermarkets play in creating food waste. Each year, up to 20 million tonnes of food are wasted in the UK, and most waste occurs before food even gets into our homes. British farmers are forced to waste millions of tonnes of fruit and veg before they even leave the farm, simply because the produce does not meet the strict cosmetic standards stipulated by supermarkets.

     Within homes, consumers bin around £12 billion of groceries each year, including nearly 100,000 tonnes of poultry meat. One major cause of food waste within homes is date-labelling, which confuses customers.

      Sell-by dates, which supermarkets use for stock control, have nothing to do with food safety.

      Best-before dates, which are supposedly for quality control purposes, are overused and often unnecessary; it’s obvious when fruit and veg, for example, are past their best.

     Even use-by dates are abused, as manufacturers set dates far in advance of when the food is likely to go off.

     Another source of food waste is supermarket bogof (buy one, get one free) offers or, even worse, buy three for the price of two, which encourage customers to buy far more fresh produce than they can realistically use before the excess starts to rot in the fridge or fruit bowl.  Consumers are essentially paying supermarkets for the privilege of throwing away excess supermarket stock, and thus saving the supermarkets the cost of doing so.

      Fortunately, shoppers in Oswestry can evade sell-by, best-before, bogof and other corporate chicanery by purchasing fresh produce from independent local food shops and market stalls, who will sell the exact amount you need – and offer free advice on what’s in season / the best cut of meat for a particular recipe, etc. 

Welcome to 2010 and a new decade, which looks like being as different from the last one as can be imaginable. The cogs have slipped, certainties have faded and global, national and individual realities loom large. Yet still we plough on in the belief that exponential growth and prosperity will lead us to greater happiness and certain survival on a finite planet.

Oswestry, as is anywhere else, a microcosm, and so developers and supermarket retailers continue to pursue their outdated solutions for a public that either have had enough and who are increasingly attracted to real choice, local identity and to being treated as social individuals (78% of Oswestry respondents say no to another supermarket. Skillsmart Survey, Nov 2009), or who simply have no more spending power to buy yet more of the same old stuff at yet another supermarket shed.

Over the pre Christmas period, so many independent retailers and market traders have said that they have had customers from other towns purely because Oswestry still has choice, small shops, items they can’t get at supermarkets and retail parks, and that they like and use the town because  that is what it has to offer.

While the Strategic Regulatory Planning Committee presides over Oswestry’s retail future, the town hangs on the cusp of being able to nurture it’s self reliance, independence and economic sustainability, or becoming one of the stragglers in opting for yet another supermarket that no one needs except developers and the supermarket chains in their pursuit of a retail model that seems more outdated as each week passes by.

While Christmas and New Year have been times to leave these matters to one side, the decision will be made on Oswestry’s supermarket bids either at the beginning of February or the beginning of March - seemingly the latter more likely. Now it’s time to voice an opinion in whatever way you can, write to the Star and Advertizer, the national press, as has been done recently in the Telegraph, write to the Strategic Regulatory Planning Committee, and  form a demonstration of opinion in Oswestry which would achieve press coverage and publicity.

There is an OS21 meeting at The Walls on Monday 11th January at which these issues will be discussed.

At any level we cannot achieve “sustainability” by building more places for consumption and consequent waste. The fact that we already throw away one third of the food we buy does not indicate a demonstrable need to have any more food retail at all. It’s a madness that has to stop somewhere and why not here in Oswestry?

Current annual figures for food wastage in Britain are:

Total: 6.7 million tons.

Thrown away by retailers: 1.6 million tons.

Cost per household: £420 p.a. rising to £610 p.a. for households with children.

Lifetime cost per household: £24,000 - £30,000+

What we could have eaten, i.e. what was not actual food waste or spoiled: 4.1 million tons.

In date food thrown away: 220,000 tons.

Past best before date thrown away: 370,000 tons. (we all have freezers - why throw away?)

Past use by date thrown away: 440,000 tons. (we all have freezers - why throw away?)

Figures from Dr. Richard Swannell of  WRAP

We collectively throw away one third of the food we buy - every third trolley load we wheel out of the supermarket is effectively wheeled straight to the tip.

This wastage costs the UK approx £8 billion a year.

So we need more supermarkets to sell us more food that we can then throw away. None of these figures are used to calculate the need for more food retail at national or local levels.

In the case of Oswestry, the arrival of Morrisons has proved that there is no need for more supermarkets. Morrisons was thronged during the first 2-3 weeks and Sainsburys was relatively empty. Now both have settled to a comfortable level of trading, with Sainsburys being slightly less “over shopped” than previously.  Morrisons arrival has not created more shoppers, more money being spent or “clawed back” any “leakage” from people shopping elsewhere. It’s like squeezing a balloon at one end - it makes the other end tighter and fuller, but doesn’t create any more air.

And here’s a thing. Google “abandoned shopping centres” or “abandoned shopping malls” for images and see the future that developers have built for in the past to the requirements of “need”.

Already commentators are beginning to talk up the end of the recession, and the need for growth, but the waste outlined above is not growth. It’s a disgrace to those who perpetrate it, and shameful to all of us who contribute to it. Growth, of production and consumption, on a finite eco system is unsustainability writ large.