Official blog for The Pig Idea - The campaign putting food waste back on the menu for pigs in Britain, Europe and around the world. Luckily where there's swill there's a way! www.thepigidea.org @ThePigIdea
Feedback win ‘Best Initiative in British Food’ for tackling food waste around the world
We were thrilled that all three of Feedback’s campaigns - The Pig Idea, Feeding the 5,000, and The Gleaning Network - won the accolade of ‘Best Initiative in British Food’ at this year’s BBC Food and Farming Awards.
The award for our “big ideas and big action to change the supply chain” is the icing on the cake after a year of hard work tackling food waste, so a big thank you to everyone who have made the campaigns such a success so far.
As Tristram Stuart, founder of Feedback, said on the night: “Feedback has become a global movement. Together, we have inspired organisations, companies, and governments to take action on food waste, and take a bite out of the one third of the food supply being wasted.”
Listen again to the awards – Feedback are presented with ours by Aardman co-founder and Wallace & Gromit creator Peter Lord at 36.50mins.
Find out more about The Pig Idea’s sister campaigns, Feeding the 5000 and The Gleaning Network.
The food security mood music has finally changed track
Less is more is a simple but transformative solution we can all buy into - as governments, farmers, retailers, and people.
The UN, World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organisation and European Commission have recently all cited tackling our unsustainable western diets and wastage in the food system as central to achieving food security. This new focus marks a welcome departure from the "produce more of the same" paradigm that has dominated the worldwide food security debate until now.
We are now rightly concentrating on fixing the problems with our current food system that, if not addressed, will prevent us from feeding the world's population well regardless of how much food we produce. The new food security mood music goes like this: less waste, less meat, more food.
There is no doubt it will catch on; the case stacks up whichever way you look at it. We'll be able to feed more people with less land, fewer precious resources and fewer emissions. We will even save money.
Common-sense will be central to our success
Of course, no conversation about food security can be summed up in two or three words. "Less is more", like its "produce more" predecessor, is a reductionist worldview, albeit a less one-dimensional one. Notably, it rebalances the food-security debate to focus on demand and supply. This common-sense perspective will be central to our success.
Most importantly, "less is more" is an everyday solution we can all buy into and benefit from now – on farms, at home, in schools or on the high street, as people making choices every day. This is a refreshing break from the norm of deferring responsibility to another place, time or person.
A world full on Western diets will be anything but food secure
Even the health benefits are palatable, an issue that too often goes missing in the food-security debate despite being central to it. We eat too much meat, and in doing so trade down to fast, factory-reared, processed meat while upping our chances of ill health. We know that a balanced diet is better for us; a world full of western diets will be anything but food-secure.
There are dangers, however, to looking at food security from one angle. The phrase "feeding the world" itself tempts us to come up with monoculture-like solutions, as if we all sit down to a table together and eat as one.
The "less is more" strapline, for its many strengths, fails to recognise that the need for change varies, depending on where we are in the world and how we live. We need to change supply – how we produce food and what we grow – as well as demand – what and how much we eat.
The one thing we can be sure of is change
Is it wise therefore to focus on and simplify solutions to problems that are global and systematic? I think so. In fact, this is the only way to approach the problem.
Feeding the world is a puzzle with a million pieces; it makes us dizzy just thinking about it. We risk losing our way in this complexity, as the "produce more" dead end served to demonstrate.
When faced with big challenges, it is tempting to bury our heads in the sand, to keep calm and carry on.
In reality, the one thing we can be sure of when it comes to our food system is change. As Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, puts it (pdf):
"The food systems we have inherited from the 20th century have failed ... a new paradigm, focused on wellbeing, resilience and sustainability must be designed to replace the productivist paradigm ... it will not be enough to refine the logic of our food systems – it must instead be reversed".
In short, let us not be held back by our own illusions of success – more of the same simply won't do. This is daunting, no doubt, but change is afoot. "Less is more" is a simple but transformative solution to a complex problem. There will be more solutions, there have to be, but this is a step in the right direction that we can all take – as governments, businesses, producers, and people. Sounds good to me.
Amy Leech, The Pig Idea Campaign Coordinator.
This blog was originally featured on Guardian Sustainable Business.
The Pig Idea responds to criticisms from certain sections of the pig industry
The Pig Idea campaign, which is calling for food waste to be put back on the menu for pigs in Britain and across Europe, has issued a response to claims by representatives of the National Pig Association (NPA) and the British Pig Executive (BPEX) that the campaign, while “well-intentioned” and “superficially attractive”, is guilty of over-simplifying the issue of feeding waste food to pigs.
In fact, there is more common ground between The Pig Idea, the NPA and BPEX than might be supposed. For example, the NPA’s position paper on feeding food waste to pigs[1] states that “Central processing plants for waste food may be an option for the future”. This is exactly what The Pig Idea campaign is calling for: a well-regulated, well-monitored system of recycling plants that can convert food waste – including catering waste and other types of food waste not currently permitted by law – safely into livestock feed.
The NPA rightly points out that establishing a modern system for the recycling of food waste into livestock feed brings with it “a raft of issues that must be addressed first.” Again, this is in line with the position of The Pig Idea, which is calling for more research to be conducted into these issues (and indeed its campaigners have been doing so since 2008). The British Government eventually commissioned a study[2] on this subject which was published by the Food and Environment Research Agency (Fera) in 2013, and its conclusion was that more work needs to be done on the details of how such a system could be established and the potential environmental and economic benefits of doing so.
BPEX, which recently contacted high-profile supporters of The Pig Idea to warn them that the campaign was guilty of over-simplifying the issue (whilst also misrepresenting the campaign by stating incorrectly that it calls for the use of domestic food waste as livestock feed), has since conceded that “no-one would disagree” with the proposal that centralised food-waste-to-pig-feed recycling plants are a possibility for the future.
The NPA, BPEX and The Pig Idea share the view that any system for the safe recycling of food waste has to deal robustly with potential risks. Most prominent of these risks is food waste becoming a vector for animal diseases such as Foot and Mouth Disease, Classical Swine Fever and African Swine Fever. This subject has been studied in depth, and every study agrees that cooking food waste is 100 per cent effective at killing the pathogens to which pigs are susceptible.
Producing feed for livestock requires a licence and oversight from the Local Authority, in the same way that producing food for people does. With such regulation in place, farmers and the public can be assured that food waste recycling plants will operate safely. In the plants visited by The Pig Idea co-founder Tristram Stuart in Japan,[3] all the food waste is sterilised as it passes through a tube. Such a system can be regulated by connecting a thermometer in the tube to a computer, which in turn is connected to a regulatory authority with oversight of the industry.
In weighing up the risks, costs and benefits, it is important to remember that the risk of animal disease from food waste does not disappear just because we aren’t feeding it to pigs. Composting plants and anaerobic digestion plants also have to ensure that any food waste entering their facilities is sterilised by heat, because the fertiliser they produce is spread on farmland where livestock can come into contact with it. Meanwhile, much untreated food waste ends up in landfill sites that are populated by vermin (including birds) capable of dropping infected materials on nearby farmland, which could also cause a disease outbreak. Arguably, a safe, economically viable system for the sterilising and recycling of this material into a valuable product would help to contain and manage such risks, rather than exacerbate them.
Those in favour of maintaining the ban often claim it is needed because there will always be law-breakers who get around the rules. It is certainly true that we need a regulated system to minimise the risks posed by such behavior; but it is by no means true that the existing laws are never broken. Many pig farmers already feed potato peels and the like from kitchens to pigs, partly because they hold the laws in disrepute. The Pig Idea therefore disagrees with the NPA’s claim that the current ban is 100 per cent enforceable. Introducing a legalised regulatory system would be one way of managing this risk better.
Another risk cited by the NPA and BPEX is that of contamination by unwanted substances: someone throws a lightbulb or bottle of bleach in the pig bucket, for example. However, just as any company found to be supplying its customers with contaminated food would be shut down, so would any company providing pig farmers with contaminated feed. Moreover, harmful materials such as pieces of plastic can and do find their way into conventional feed.
There is perhaps less consensus between The Pig Idea and the NPA and BPEX regarding the environmental impact of conventional pig feed – particularly with regard to its use of imported soy, the production of which is linked to the destruction of valuable ecosystems such as the Amazon rainforest and the Cerrado grasslands. Pig farmer and BPEX board member Alastair Butler wrote in The Huffington Post[4] that “many” pig farmers plan to use soy procured from Argentina and North America through a “responsible sourcing” scheme (the Round Table on Responsible Soy). The benefits of this scheme are not clear, and besides, any net increase in the global demand for soy will lead ultimately to the clearing of more virgin land to create soy monocultures, destroying more habitats of vulnerable species of wildlife, while increasing soil erosion and greenhouse gas emissions.
Butler also points out, as does the NPA, that some British pig farmers are replacing some of the soy in their feed with home-grown legumes. However, in our globalised food system, this still increases the net demand for agricultural land – which still has the knock-on effect elsewhere in the world of increasing deforestation. Indeed, in many cases, using local pulses requires even more land, because these crops aren’t as efficient as soy at producing protein per acre.
A study commissioned by BPEX did in fact highlight that the production of feed was overwhelmingly the biggest environmental impact of pork production, and that replacing conventional feed with alternatives was an enormous opportunity for the pig industry.[5]
There is an issue of social justice here that the NPA and BPEX do not address: namely that by buying huge quantities of grain on the global market to feed our livestock, we are diminishing the ability of people in poor countries to feed themselves. Studies show that around 36 per cent of the global harvest is used to feed livestock, including 97 per cent of all soy production [6], and 74 per cent of maize.[7] Not only is this a waste of limited resources (farm animals only give back on average around a third of the calories they consume in the form of meat, milk and eggs); North American and European livestock are effectively outbidding poor African, Asian and Latin American people on the world food market.
The solution is clear. We need to use livestock for the purpose for which they were first domesticated: that is, to increase net food availability by harnessing resources that can’t otherwise be used. The UN has estimated that if we were to feed livestock primarily on waste and surplus food and agricultural byproducts, we could liberate enough grain to feed three billion people[8] – far more than the number we expect to be sharing our planet with by 2050. In the case of pigs, that means eating up waste and by-products from our food supply. During the Second World War, these were the only types of food that could legally be fed to pigs; feeding them grain that could have been eaten by humans was a fineable offence. Butler and the NPA make the point that even today, the British pig industry uses around a million tonnes of ‘co- and byproducts’ per year, amounting to around forty per cent of pig feed (though some of these ingredients, such as palm oil kernel, also contribute to the destruction of rainforests). We should be aiming for as close to 100 per cent as possible. Much more can be done under current legislation, and still more would be possible if the ban on feeding certain types of food waste (such as catering waste[9]) were lifted.
It is time to lay aside the differences and focus on constructive dialogue – and The Pig Idea is optimistic about the possibility of achieving this, as the campaign presents very substantial economic savings for farmers who currently spend an average of sixty per cent of their costs on feed. Pig farmers in Europe are therefore at a substantial disadvantage compared to pig farmers in other parts of the world where using food waste is encouraged, such as in Japan, China, parts of the USA, New Zealand and across Africa and Asia. Waste producers in the catering sector also stand to gain by avoiding the increasing costs of disposing of food waste. A sustainable industry recycling food waste into pig feed would create jobs, profits and huge environmental benefits. Following a lively debate about the pros and cons of re-introducing swill-feeding at the Young NPA’s recent National Meeting (which brings together pig farmers under the age of forty), Tristram Stuart asked the audience how many of them had started the day being against the idea but were now open to the idea. Encouragingly, around a third of them raised their hands.
The Pig Idea has been involved in discussions with representatives of the NPA and BPEX about how best to explore the technicalities of introducing a system of safe, centralised food waste recycling plants for pig feed. An agreement has been reached to find a suitable neutral body to convene a panel of experts from a range of professional backgrounds including nutritionists, veterinarians, agricultural engineers, regulatory bodies such as Defra and the Food Standards Agency, and scientists behind the modern systems established in countries such as Japan. It is hoped that a first meeting of this group will be held in the early part of 2014.
[1] The National Pig Association, November 2013, “NPA position of feeding ‘waste food’ to pigs” http://www.npa-uk.org.uk/Pages/waste_food.html
[2] Fera, 2013 (research conducted 2011-2012), “Recycling of catering and food waste” http://randd.defra.gov.uk/Default.aspx?Menu=Menu&Module=More&Location=None&Completed=0&ProjectID=17580
[3] Several Japanese food waste recycling plants are described in detail in Stuart’s book Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, Penguin (2009).
[4] Alastair Butler, 26 November 2013, “The Problem with the ‘Pig Idea’”, The Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/alastair-butler/pig-idea-free-range_b_4344209.html
[5] Kingston, et.al, 2009. Scoping Life Cycle Assessment of Pork Production: Final Report. Environmental Resources Management. http://www.bpex.org.uk/prices-facts-figures/documents/LifeCycelAssmntofPorklaunchversion.pdf
[6] Henning Steinfeld et al, 2006, “Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental issues and options”, UN FAO http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.htm
[7] Emily Cassidy et al, August 2013, “Redefining agricultural yields: from tonnes to people nourished per hectare”, Environmental Research Letters 8 034015
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/3/034015/pdf/1748-9326_8_3_034015.pdf
[8] United Nations Environment Programme (2009), The Environmental Food Crisis – The Environment’s Role in Averting Future Food Crises. A UNEP Rapid Response Assessment, ed. C. Nellemann et al., February 2009, p. 19
[9] The latest study by the Government’s Waste Resources and Action Programme revealed that 920,000 tonnes of food waste are produced by catering outlets each year, and only 12% is currently recycled.
WRAP, November 2013, “Overview of Waste in the UK Hospitality and Food Service Sector” http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Overview%20of%20Waste%20in%20the%20UK%20Hospitality%20and%20Food%20Service%20Sector%20FINAL_0.pdf
FACTORY FARMING, SOY PRODUCTION AND THE DESTRUCTION OF LANDS AND LIVES IN ARGENTINA
"The world’s reliance on soy to feed factory farmed animals is having a devastating impact. In Argentina, ’Big Soy’ production is ruining lands and lives. Raw campaigners spent time with Argentinean communities to investigate the true cost of factory farming. Witness the Soy Story below." www.raw.info
For the past seven months The Pig Idea has been campaigning to change the way we feed our livestock. We have been doing so to highlight the huge environmental, social and economic impacts of feeding crops to animals, and to promote the sustainable practise of feeding food waste to ruminant omnivores, such as chickens and pigs.
Today we want to share Soy Story. This short film, produced by the guys at RAW (Compassion In World Farming's sister organisation) documents the stories of people in South America who's lives have been ruined by the intensive production of soy.
Our dependence on 'cheap meat' has causing untold destruction not only to the environment and our own health but also to the lives of people on the other side of the planet. The true cost of this is not revealed when we purchase meat that has been reared on crops. As I recently wrote for FoodTank.org:
"We all need to reduce the amount of meat we eat, and likewise we need to make sure that what we do eat comes from the right kinds of farms. However, in order to truly improve the sustainability of our livestock industry the most important step that needs to be taken is in the way we feed our animals."
Beyond improving the sustainability of our livestock industry, it is immoral for us to turn a blind eye to the chain reaction the industrial meat-grain complex has on people in vulnerable regions.
Please watch the video and share it online.
If you only have three minutes you can watch the short(er) version here.
You can find out more about Raw's work online at www.raw.info.
On the 21st November The Pig Idea team took London by storm and served over 5,000 portions of food to the public for free in Trafalgar Square
Each of the seven participating restaurants handed out a variety of dishes using pork that had been reared by the campaign at Stepney City Farm on a diet of food that otherwise would have been wasted.
For more information about the campaign please visit www.thepigidea.org
Credits go to Mark Barrs, Alastair Kenneil (Farms Not Factories), and Gideon Smit for helping produce this video.
‘Dearly Loved Children, Is it not a sin, When you peel potatoes, To throw away the skin? For the skin feeds the pigs, And the pigs feed you. Dearly loved children,
Is this not true?’
The Sustainable Business Toolkit have voted The Pig Idea as one of the top ten food sustainability initiatives alongside the likes of Food Cycle, Rubies in the Rubble and Food Save.
On the 21st November The Pig Idea team served over 5,000 portions of food to the public for free.
Each of the seven participating restaurants handed out a variety of dishes using pork that had been reared by the campaign at Stepney City Farm on a diet of food that otherwise would have been wasted.
The team were joined by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, Sara Cox, Giles Coren, Valentine Warner, Stevie Parle and Bruno Loubert on the day who all got on stage to wow the audience with some interesting pork-based cooking demos - from trotters to tounge!
Staying true to the campaign's ethos of nose-to-tail eating, the blood of the pigs was used by David Philpot from Paternoster Chophouse for his infamous black pudding scotch eggs, and the livers, lungs and hearts were used by culinary diploma students from Westminster Kingsway College to make an offal terrine.
All of this and we even had time for a pig & food waste themed ceilidh slap bang in the middle of Trafalgar Square...
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The aim of the feast was to raise awareness of the issues surrounding the feeding of crops to pigs in order to gather support for The Pig Idea campaign which seeks to utilise food waste as a valuable and effect alternative feed for pigs.
The Pig Idea have been rearing 8 pigs on Stepney City Farm since June this year on a diet of legally permissible food waste. The aim of this demonstration was to show that not only is this method of feeding pigs safe and environmentally friendly, but that the end product is also delicious.
A key message of the day was that whilst we all need to reduce our meat consumption drastically, the remaining meat that we do eat needs to come not only from animals that have been bred and reared under the highest welfare standards, but also from animals that have been fed in the most sustainable way, whether that's food waste fed pork or pasture-fed beef.
As a result 7,444 people have now signed The Pig Idea pledge to not only reduce their own food waste but also to show that they want food businesses to start adhering to the food waste hierarchy.
There's been some ab-swill-lutely brilliant press coverage over the past few days which can be found here. Photographs from the day can be found on the Feeding the 5000 Facebook page. We've also got a short film coming shortly so stay tuned!
The Pig Idea would like to thank the following for their tremendous support in helping organise and fund the feast:
Alex Burrows Events, The Mayor of London, London Food, Wahaca, The Zetter Group, Cabana, D&D London, Soho House, Rex Restaurant Associates, Ballymaloe Cookery School, The River Cafe, Stepney City Farm, Clean Bean, Gringa Dairy, the White Hart Brewery, Reynolds, Bio Collectors, Compassion in World Farming, Farms Not Factories, Friends of the Earth, Slow Food London, Miranda Godfrey and her students from Westminster Kingsway College, Adam Taffler, Green House PR, Story PR, and of course all of our ham-azing volunteers:
Finally, a huge thank you from The Pig Idea team to everyone who came to support the campaign - oink!
All photo credits go to Ki Price, Karolina Webb & Diana Jarvis respectively.
On the 30th October Pig Idea I spoke at the Royal Geographical Society's 21st Century Challenge event on Feeding the 9 Billion.
Joining me on the stage was the evening's chair Jay Rayner, entomologist Peter Smithers, and Professor Tim Wheeler.
With a growing world population, slowly accompanied by a increased hunger for meat and dairy products I spoke about the global need to address the way in which we feed animals in order to tackle the social and environmental impacts this industry has on our planet.
My penultimate slide dubbed You Are What Your Meat Eats called for people to begin to think critically about what goes on beyond the shop floor that provides us with neatly packed meat products. Increased public concern for animal welfare as well reduced meat consumption across the UK (as recently shown by the Eating Better campaign) has recently shown that people are thinking twice about eating meat that has been reared unsustainably. However, as I suggested during the evening, we need to understand that the impacts of livestock farming do not simply stop at the farm gate.
The current practise of importing conventional feed products from environmentally vulnerable regions of the world is not only resulting in deforestation, biodiversity loss, and increased green house gas emissions - it is also using food that could be used to feed the world's current 852 million people living with hunger.
In fact, the UN estimates that the current amount of food that is grown simply to be fed to animals is enough to feed 3 billion people - more than the additional 2 billion people we expect to be sharing our planet with by 2050.
The facts are simple. We currently feed 37% of the global harvest to animals, who in return give us 11% of this back in meat, dairy and egg products. This signifies a loss of over a quarter of the potential energy available at the point of harvest. However, what this does not represent is the expensive resource usage that has gone into growing these crops. Land, water, agrochemicals, and oil have all be used to grow these crops in order to fatten our animals. These things aren't cheap, and in an era where waste is of paramount importance we need to start thinking not just in food miles that describe the 'farm to fork' narrative, but also in the resources and transportation required by each and every input used to grow those crops, in order to grow those animals, in order to feed our growing demand for meat.
Enough ranting. The Pig Idea has a solution: with 15 million tonnes of food going to waste every year in the UK alone, why are we not feeding this to pigs? This virtuous cycle of food-pig-pork-food has been going on since humans domesticated pigs thousands of years ago. In fact, as I show in the video above, it was actually a fineable offence during both World Wars to feed anything other than food waste to livestock.
I might be a vegan, but in a world with a growing population ever-hungry for meat I don't believe its enough to simply say stop eating meat. Of course it's one thing to reduce your meat consumption, but the rest of the meat you consume must come from farms that have reared their animals in a sustainable way and with the highest of animal welfare standards.
Alongside the work of many campaigns that are highlighting the negative impacts of high meat diets to the planet and our own health, The Pig Idea aims to change the way in which we feed livestock in order to minimise the environmental, social, and economic impacts of our current industrial meat-grain complex.
For us to do that we need public support. So come to The Pig Idea Feast on the 21st November in Trafalgar Square and sign the pledge at www.thepigidea.org
- Edd Colbert
Feel free to share this video as its under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license from The Royal Geographical Society.
The Pig Idea campaign team is offering you the chance to get involved with the Pig Idea Feast, this year’s most exciting food event in Trafalgar Square for 5000 members of the public on 21 November 2013.
We are looking for a winning delicious pork recipe to be cooked live on stage by Thomasina Miers, chef and founder of Wahaca Restaurants, and BBC Radio 2 presenter Sara Cox.
Think you have a secret recipe to make the world’s best bacon sandwich?
Know a thing or two about pork chops?
Are you 'offal' at cooking but love pig puns?
Send your recipe ideas to: [email protected] with the subject title of Peoples Pig Recipe.
We’d also love it if you could tweet the name of your recipe to @ThePigIdea (not forgetting to use the #peoplespig).
THE PRIZE
The winning recipe will be chosen by Thomasina Miers and The Pig Idea's Hambassadors Sara Cox and John Torode to be cooked on stage at the feast, where you can join Sara and Tommi to ensure the recipe is cooked to your satisfaction and to have your photo taken with the chefs.
Plus you will win a meal for four at a Wahaca restaurant of your choice. There is also the chance to win dinner for two at Wahaca for the best pig pun submitted.
Terms and conditions
1. All entrants must be received by 12pm on the 15th November 2013 2. The competition is open to anyone to enter 3. The prizes are restricted to those stated above and travel expenses cannot be reimbursed in order to attend the feast 4. The winning recipe will be cooked on the 21st November 2013 5. Full entry details must be sent to [email protected] (twitter is an optional extra but is not a requirement to win)
Company Shop: Working with cattle farmers to tackle food waste
It’s no accident that there is currently a wealth of coverage on the massive amount of food waste across the UK.
With up to fifteen million tons of food discarded each year, four million tons of that – the equivalent of £1billion worth of food - is thrown away despite being perfectly edible.
It is the responsibility of the collective supply chain to ensure good food does not go to waste. Everyone will reap the financial and environmental benefits of reducing food waste, including the 13 million people identified as living below the poverty line in the UK.
As one of the UK’s leading food redistribution organisation, Company Shop works closely with farmers, brands and manufacturers to ethically tackle residual products, whilst ensuring wholesome food remains available for human consumption.
As The Pig Idea campaigns for the return of feeding surplus food to pigs, one of our recent initiatives has focused on working with cattle farmers.
A sustainable outlet for sustainable beef
In May 2012 we took the unprecedented step of donating food waste to local South Yorkshire farmers to feed their animals, in return for home-grown meat being supplied for distribution to local charities.
Dubbed the ‘Company Shop Cows’, we reared our first cow on a range of inedible surplus food from the retail and manufacturing industry that was no longer fit for human consumption. This included pasta, confectionary, fruit and vegetables, which together made up 25% of the cow’s diet. Our innovative approach has demonstrated the possibility of using food products that would otherwise be wasted, to feed livestock and create highly valuable, nourishing meals for people that need them the most, distributed through charity networks.
The beneficiaries have been locally-based FareShare, the national charity supporting communities to help relieve food poverty, the Barnsley Churches Drop-In Project and The Salvation Army. Rather than give these charities batches of food they don’t want or need, these donations have ensured they are getting the best, wholesome ingredients, helping to minimise waste and maximise the benefit for the most disadvantaged through protein-rich foods. Food charities desperately need nutritious staples, and we are glad that this scheme can help provide those to people who need it most.
(Meat from Company Shop’s cows being served at the Barnsley Churches Drop-In Project.)
The success of the ‘Company Shop Cow model’ illustrates the benefits of what The Pig Idea is campaigning for, and the wider possibility of using waste to produce more food for the future. The process is very simple but fits perfectly into our business model. It creates a closed loop recycling system and extracts further value from food, rather than sending it to landfill or to anaerobic digestion.
Since the launch of our Cows, we have managed to integrate the 'spirit' of the process into the wider culture of our business and have recently introduced the model into our Corby operation and are now working with Pig Farmers in the Corby area with a view to providing further support to food charities in the area.
A call to action
In the context of the growing food poverty crisis in this country, there has never been a stronger social imperative to support food redistribution and uphold the food waste hierarchy so that wholesome food does not go to waste.
Manufacturers and suppliers today are under increasing pressure to manage their waste sustainably, reclaim value from residual stock, and promote environmental sustainability at the same time. Moreover, food waste costs the industry money, prevents perfectly edible food from being consumed, and contributes to nasty emissions from landfill – the bottom of the food waste hierarchy.
Company Shop is proud that its most recent Staff Shop in South Yorkshire has achieved zero waste to landfill, with 98% of all food stock going to human consumption. But more imaginative action is needed if we hope to see this change, and it is innovation from the likes of The Pig Idea and Company Shop that can spearhead this change.
Since our launch in June we have received 5,623 pledges from individuals who want to see food retailers and manufacturers diverting more legally permissible food to feeding pigs!
On top of this staggering figure 108 businesses have now signed up to show their commitment to reducing their food waste and where possible to diverting their food waste to the feeding of pigs.
Over the past few months The Pig Idea has teamed up with Compassion In World Farming's campaign team Raw who have helped us spread the message far and wide across the world, in turn getting thousands of people to sign the pledge! They do some truely ham-azing work campaigning against intensive livestock farming - check them out at www.raw.info and @RawTeam.
Have you signed the pledge yet? Head over to www.thepigidea.org to find out more and add your name to campaign to show that you want to put food waste back on the menu for Europe's pigs.
Sometimes you come across a problem so clear and a solution so obvious that you cannot help but get behind it. Tommi and Tristram are doing an extremely important job, the promotion of a common sense solution to a devastatingly stupid man made problem. Somehow they’ve even managed to make pig food a sexy cause, and I’m proud to see the industry supporting the campaign in full strength.
"By reducing food waste, the need to raise food production would decrease by 60% to meet the population demands of 2050", suggests the FAO's latest report Food wastage footprint: Impacts on natural resources.
The report tracks the environmental impacts of global food wastage in relation to biodiversity loss & deforestation, land-use change, resource wastage (including fuel & water), and green house gas emissions.
The report also highlights the difference in wastage found in growing different types of food. Meat and dairy animals, due to their feed conversion ratios require a greater input of resources to produce than crops.
However the FAO suggests that, "food not fit for human consumption should be reused to feed animals" - a change in the way we deal with food waste that would improve livestock farming's impact on the environment.
Animal feed is also recognised as the largest contributor to emissions associated with monogastric ruminants, ie pigs and chickens. Furthermore the greatest water usage associated with the rearing of animals comes from growing their feed, not from what they drink.
A promotional video (below) for the report highlighted the need to follow the food waste hierarchy in order to
reduce food waste,
redirect edible food to people in need,
recycle food by feeding food unfit for human consumption to suitable livestock animals - keeping food in the food chain!
The video also suggests how consumers can reduce the amount of food they waste, from storing food properly and shopping sensibly, to ordering smaller portions in restaurants.
(click here to tweet the video)
If you agree with the FAO that more food waste that is not suitable for human consumption should be fed to pigs and chickens then sign The Pig Idea pledge here.
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