By Charlie Spring – Food Waste & Insecurity

Over a year ago, I wrote about signs of institutionalisation and corporatisation of surplus food redistribution in the form of food charity in Britain, citing others’ warnings about looking to North America (where food banking has flourished for over three decades) for ideas on how to address household food insecurity.

Rather, perhaps, this article will suggest that we should be looking for warnings. Others have said this before in relation to the replacement of state benefits by charitable gifts: see, for example, Graham Riches’ lessons from Canada. Critical researchers are painting a clearer picture of the influence corporations have asserted over this neoliberal shift in food provision for those on low incomes.

Andy Fisher’s forthcoming book examines what he calls the ‘Anti-hunger Industrial Complex’ in the US, whereby large corporate donations and food bank board membership creates, he argues, “a perpetual poverty machine”. These partnerships, he suggests, exert a chilling effect on effective advocacy targeted at government policy and food system change.

Can such warnings apply to on-going debates around food insecurity and the role of emergency food provision here in the UK? I will draw upon some recent research in North America, including visits to food banks, anti-hunger advocacy and activism groups and policy makers, to trace the way corporate and charity interests can intertwine such that it threatens the work of addressing poverty and waste at their roots.

First, a questioning of received representations of the relationship between food waste and hunger. Media narratives often portray food going to waste as a moral problem BECAUSE of so many lacking a decent diet (“a third of food wasted while a million people receive Trussell Trust food parcels”, say), but this can inadvertently lead one to think that the solution to household food insecurity is to simply re-divert the waste. Charitable food redistribution efforts can become viewed as the main solution and can divert attention from, or provide an excuse for, government inactivity, as Janet Poppendieck argued forcefully of America in her 1998 book Sweet Charity.

While food waste and poverty can indeed be argued to result from an economic system that prioritises profits for food companies over the human right to food and nourishment for bodies and minds, simply trying to rebalance scarcity with excess will not solve the underlying inequalities. Radical (‘at the root’) solutions to food waste (tackling deliberate overproduction, for example) must be implemented separately from radical solutions to the poverty that underlies food insecurity (remedying income inequality and ensuring a welfare system that offers welfare rather than imposing destitution through errors, delays and sanctions).

But radical solutions are far from where we are right now. Mainstream parties’ faultlines are being rewritten and civil servants are likely to be distracted on an unprecedented scale by tumultuous new ground post-Brexit referendum. While the community and voluntary sector continues to struggle with competitive funding pots and the fallout of cuts to statutory services, food charities have gained prominence as a crutch for families struggling to put food on the table. And with government support lacking, perhaps it’s easy to see how corporate philanthropy and ‘social responsibility’ can enter the spaces left by the erosion of a robust social security net. Further, the replacement of welfare entitlements by corporate surplus donation risks perpetuating a system that prioritises the needs of the wealthy few over the vulnerable many.

Food charity, which often sees food donated by farmers, wholesalers and large retailers redistributed to those less able to access it through the primary market, has never just been about food aid to starving nations: America saw redistribution of government-bought surplus commodities to the breadlines of the Great Depression. Recent book First World Hunger Revisited describes examples of food charity replacing state-backed entitlements from Hong Kong to Finland. The existence and spread of a global model is exemplified by the Global Food Banking Network (GFBN), headquartered in Chicago and offering resources for organisations wishing to set up food banks all over the world. They have been poised to assist Europe’s transition to using food charity as a solution to food waste, and convene an annual ‘Food Bank Leadership Institute’, whose sponsors include the charitable foundations of Kellogg, Bank of America and General Mills[1], just some of GFBN’s major corporate funders. The board of directors of Feeding America, the largest foodbanking network in the States, includes senior staff of ConAgra, General Mills, MARS, Kroger, Walmart, PWC and Morgan Stanley. Their annual review 2015 displays the logos of ‘Mission Partners’: companies making large financial or food donations: these include Bayer, Del Monte, Coca Cola, Sysco and Dannon. ‘Guiding Partners’ (with slightly less large donations) include Starbucks, Proctor and Gamble, ALDI, United Airlines. Elsewhere on the donor list we find Kellogg, Amazon, KFC, IKEA, TGI Fridays, Ford, Hershey and good old Chicken of the Sea.

Before asking why corporates and food charities might make good bedfellows, can anything of this order be glimpsed in the UK? Certainly, a number of large companies have expressed a keen interest in ‘fighting food poverty’: Kellogg have sponsored research reports about food poverty in Manchester, while Unilever tweeted this image in their ‘Clear a Plate’ campaign in 2015:

In the wake of public pressure to audit and tackle their food waste generation, supermarkets and other food distributors have increasingly sought alliance with the growing food charity sector in the UK: more visible collaborations include Tesco’s roll out of the Irish social enterprise FoodCloud’s app that links local charities to Tesco stores with end-of-day wasted stock. On World Food Day Kellogg pledged to donate 62 million bowls of cereal to school children.

What to make of this growing field of relationships? Is it simply a matter of mutual convenience- charities providing a useful and cheap means to dispose of food whose wastage has become increasingly publically visible, unacceptable and costly to landfill (FareShare’s partnership with Nestle has reduced the company’s food waste to landfill from 100% to 5%)? Or is this part of a larger landscape moulded by the failure of government to legislate against food waste or remedy the welfare reforms that have pushed many to the food banks? Does this landscape pave the way for corporate philanthropy to fill gaps in public provision? Of course, government has a role to play in preventing or enabling the way corporations and charities co-exist: in the United States companies receive a tax credit for donating edible surplus, which critics view as a public subsidy on an inadequate response to hunger (for example, Valerie Tarasuk on similar proposals in Canada). French companies can claim up to 60% of the value of donated food as a corporate tax credit[1]. Following the imposition of France’s Food Waste Law 2016-138 in February 2016, retailers covering over 400 square metres are required and incentivised by law to find a charitable recipient for any wasted food. Little evidence exists as yet as to any impacts on government commitments to address food insecurity, or whether charities are struggling to manage the burden of accepting increasing quantities of unpredictable surplus food, as some research is beginning to show.

It’s not easy to critique the ‘common sense’ of preventing food waste whilst supplying food to the needy, especially as someone who’s never been chronically food insecure. But we must ask ourselves who we wish to bear responsibility for the nature and future orientations of food access. Would it be better for retailers to make efforts to reduce the overproduction that underwrites the maintenance of capitalist value? While there is much uncertainty around the ways we should tackle food waste, such an approach should surely not detract from a clear commitment to eradicate poverty, as advocated in the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s most recent report and campaign? Last month saw the launch of End Hunger UK, a coalition of major charity players in the UK’s growing food insecurity ‘complex’. It envisages several months of ‘big conversation’ up and down the country, aiming to engage charities, media and ministers in formulating policy asks to address household food insecurity at its roots. A key aim of the campaign is to ensure that those with lived experience of food insecurity are involved in the debates and decisions around how to tackle it, but perhaps we also need critical insight into the agendas behind those who would wish to see charitable food waste redistribution rolled out.

[1] http://www.eesc.europa.eu/resources/docs/comparative-study-on-eu-member-states-legislation-and-practices-on-food-donation_finalreport_010714.pdf

[1] https://www.foodbanking.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/GFN15_Singles.pdf