- Households waste £57 a month each of food
- Restaurants produce 600,000 tonnes a year of food waste
These claims seemed so outrageous that R4's 'Farming Today' investigated them. A BBC / Comres poll found that households estimated 'wasting' only some £10 of food a month, and of the restaurant waste, 30% is 'plate waste', i.e. what customers leave uneaten, 65% is preparation waste and only 5% is throwing-away out of date or degraded foodstuff. Thus contrary to WRAP's message, restaurant businesses are in fact closely controlling the waste-source that they should be.
Some of the spurious calculations behind WRAP's mendacity are easy; some require some knowledge of catering business planning. First, take potatoes. WRAP classifies the entire raw potato, including soil traces, eyes, black bits and the skin as 'food'. The act of peeling, washing and cleaning spuds in preparation for cooking may turn 1kg of raw potatoes into 750g. WRAP calculate this as 25% waste at £0.70/kg. However, unless you keep chickens, it's hard to see what you can do with potato peel and eyes.
Next, take a rib of beef of 5kg at £8.00/kg. This will shrink during cooking by about 25%. The inedible bone will also make up some 15% of the cooked weight. The joint will therefore yield something like 3.2kg of edible meat; no doubt WRAP would count this as 36% wasted, or £14.40 in waste. Of course you can plop the bone into the stockpot, but at the end of the day you're still going to have to throw it out.
This distortion of fact is important as WRAP claim their campaign can reduce waste to landfill and make people better-off; both are spurious and dangerous claims. For a start, waste to landfill is a government / EU created problem, not one of available capacity. Secondly, the assumption that not only benefit claimants but pensioners and those on low incomes can offset rising food prices by wasting less is utterly irresponsible.
Of course there is no need to slavishly follow 'best by' dates, but WRAP's claims and campaign goes far beyond this - they need to justify CE Liz Goodwin's salary of £194,000 and the quango's cost to taxpayers of some £79m a year. Oh, and their food waste campaign can surely have nothing to do with WRAP's commercial sales of £2.2m a year (their sole non-tax income) of home food-waste composting bins, can it?