In July this year, as we faced the fact that the economy had moved from a credit crunch into a full-blown recession, the British Retail Consortium revealed that food prices were rising three times as fast as the average wage. At a time when money is becoming increasingly scarce and food increasingly valuable, it often feels like little can be done to stop that tug at the purse strings. However, it seems some have found a way to ease the pinch of the economic downturn, but it’s not for everyone.
Whatever you want to call it; skipping, dumpster-diving or freeganism, there is no getting around the fact that in involves rummaging around in bins in the middle of the night for food that’s been thrown away. I first came across this counter-consumerist movement quite by accident; when in the pub a friend of a friend finished her drink, got up to leave and announced that she was going up to Summertown to do some skipping.
Like the majority of people, I’d never heard of skipping – and, like the majority of people, once I had heard of it, I wasn’t an immediate convert. Besides, food has a use-by date for a reason, doesn’t it? Well, yes and no. One of the reasons why skipping can yield some profitable hauls that are safe to eat is the confusion surrounding use-by and best-before dates. Whereas use-by dates mean the food should definitely not be eaten after it’s expiry, the best-before date indicates that food is past its best after that date has expired, but is crucially still edible. The problem is that many consumers aren’t aware of this distinction, and so they don’t purchase food past its best-before date.
In a society where the consumer is king, this means that supermarkets are forced to trash food that is perfectly safe to eat. Unfortunately, since EU law requires both best-before and use-by dates, the Environment Agency’s plans to scrap best before dates last summer were still-born.
‘I’ll bring back armfuls of sandwiches to my halls. They go pretty quickly.’
Stephen Robertson, Director General of the British Retail Consortium, said that this shouldn’t matter, ‘Scrapping best-before dates won’t reduce food waste,’ he said. ‘Customer education will.’ He is also points out that it isn’t just food in supermarkets that goes to waste. The same use-by/best-before confusion in the home means that good food goes to waste in dustbins up and down the country. WRAP, the Government funded Waste and Resource Programme estimates that in England and Wales alone, household and commercial food wastage amounts to over 3.5 million tonnes of perfectly edible food being thrown away each year. This means that whilst in the midst of the recession, a staggering £12.2 billion of food per year is being needlessly bulldozed into landfill. Rummaging around in bins in the middle of night is starting to make sense.
So what is the skipping scene like in Oxford? ‘Robert’, a third year undergraduate, first went skipping a year ago. ‘I was already involved in various environmental groups, and then a friend told me about the amount of free food that was on offer. I was appalled at the amount of wastefulness’. Since then, he tries to go at least a couple of times a week. ‘Quite often you come across bins that have already been skipped – but usually there is something on offer, because we only take what we need and there is always more food than one person can take.’ Speaking to Robert, I wondered the extent to which freeganism remains a fringe activity of the idealistic few. ‘A fair amount of people in Oxford go skipping,’ he assures me. ‘Actually, you start to recognise people after a while’. When I ask what sort of food you can expect to find around the city, I’m amazed at the variety Robert describes: ‘Sandwiches, doughnuts, bread (there is always bread), fresh fruit and veg. I once found a whole packet of hobnobs – that was pretty nice,’ he muses. ‘My best haul? Well, once I found some tortellini and then in the very next bin I found a jar of posh pasta sauce. It was a good dinner that night.’
But is there really such a thing as a free meal? Robert asks me not to publish the specific supermarkets and cafes where he goes skipping. When such information has been published in the public domain before, freegans have found that the food in their favourite skips has been sprayed with bleach, or even mixed with broken glass. As well as that, removing food from bins is illegal – if caught, freegans could potentially be prosecuted under the 1968 Theft Act, although no freegans in Britain have ever been charged. Aside from the free food, Robert believes that freeganism is worth the risk. ‘It’s a way to try and counteract the socially accepted culture of wastefulness that is so obscene. Supermarkets, in the interests of increasing their profit margins, are willing to allow perfectly edible food, that has in many cases been over-packaged and travelled a great distance, to end up in a landfill site where it rots, contributing to global warming, driving us even more towards climate change. Freeganism is a way to negate these effects of over-consumption.’
Nevertheless, I put it to Robert that there are many who just wouldn’t want to take food from a bin. ‘No, maybe not…But what I’ve found is that whilst there are certainly those who aren’t willing to go skipping themselves, plenty of people are willing to eat what I find. Often, I’ll bring back armfuls of sandwiches from [well-known high street sandwich chain] to my halls, put them in a fridge and put up a sign telling them where the food is from, inviting people to help themselves. They go pretty quickly.’
But it’s not just students who engage in freeganism. Websites and forums from around the world have sprung up all over the internet dedicated to sharing information and tips. One website, www.freegan.org.uk advertises freegan meet-ups and skipping expeditions, and allows users to share their experiences. ‘I had my first freegan experience with a friend yesterday’, wrote one user, ‘It was amazing. We collected for free bread and cakes that we shared with five other people…I’m looking for people living in the same area as me to keep on collecting food’.
The website also shares the best places to go skipping, depending on what you are looking for. Sainsbury’s for example, is one of the best supermarkets to go skipping for bread according to one website, because of company policies that govern the life cycle of bread. The first day a loaf is baked on site, it sits on the bread counter to buy fresh, then if it’s not sold it gets sliced up and put on a shelf, on the third day it’s heavily reduced, and on the fourth day, it ends up in the skip at the back of the shop.
After talking to Robert and learning of his and other freegans’ experiences, I couldn’t help but admire their actions. Whilst skipping might not be for everyone, it does highlight the culture of over-consumption that many people in Britain are either ignorant of, or else apathetic towards. As food prices, the rate of climate change and the amount of food that goes to waste all continue to rise, Britain can’t afford to not take notice of the levels of wastefulness for much longer.
Is anybody listening, Mr Clegg?
Nick Clegg opens his question and answer session in the Wesley Memorial Chapel with disarming modesty: “I’m not a walking encyclopaedia” he insists, “I don’t necessarily have every single fact, every single statistic at the end of my fingertips”. He does a good line in expectation management, a skill that no doubt comes in handy as leader of the Liberal Democrats. It is easy to denigrate Britain’s ‘third party’, so near to power and yet so very far; a party that at once looks back to a distinguished Liberal past and forward to the bright new dawn that always seems to be just around the corner. However, Lib Dem-bashing is a sad sport that doesn’t seem to do British politics any good – at its worst it is a wilful denial of the possibility of progressive change in this country. As such, it is easy to see why Clegg works himself into a lather over the “rotten political system” that perpetuates the Lab-Con seesaw and switches off the average voter from political debate.
It is only a radical who could utter the words “Westminster is a clapped-out 19th century institution that desperately needs to be replaced”. There are few in either of the two main parties who could bring themselves to do so, and neither Cameron nor Brown have shown an appetite to “change the fundamental corruption in the British political system” as the Lib Dem leader says we must. Clegg’s words are tough, but is anyone listening?
On many points I find it – personally – very hard to disagree with Nick Clegg’s diagnosis of our political system: the influence of “big money” on party funding; the unrepresentative nature of our House of Commons; one of the only unelected second chambers in the world. To Clegg, all of these problems add up to voter disengagement. He repeats several times the statistical nugget that “more people didn’t vote in the last election than voted for the winning party”. He is convinced that our politics fails to prove its relevance to people and he’s convinced that Labour and the Conservatives “don’t want to change it”, unlike the “insurgent” Liberal Democrats. The problem is, such radicalism is easily dismissed as the preserve of the irresponsible, those not faced with the gravity of government can afford to offer pie in the sky. Take last week, when Clegg went on a media blitz to peddle the idea that the government scrap the Queen’s Speech and spend the last 70 sitting days of Parliament getting the House in order. Prima facie, it’s a great idea, but it was never going to happen, and would have been a constitutional and political headache for all involved. Instead of stoking a vital debate about the dismal pace of parliamentary reform and Labour’s timidity, he was given a rather condescending hearing by most commentators.
‘There is something seriously sick in the way we run politics.’
This gets to the crux of the Lib Dem problem: there is a time in any party’s political life when they have to decide whether they are happy with insurgency or whether they want to make a viable claim to become the Establishment. Labour had to do it in the early 20th century, and I would argue the Liberal Democrats have to have that conversation today. Early in his leadership, Nick Clegg declared “I want to be Prime Minister”, and this pointed in the right direction for a grown up party. But a Prime Minister, and more importantly a party of government, is judged by the breadth of its vision, by its pragmatism and by its sense of purpose. These are all traits which Clegg has tried to bring out in the Lib Dems, showing that they are hard-headed as well as idealistic. For instance, the Lib Dem conference row over the fate of their policy on tuition fees. Clegg wanted to show the public that he understood politics was about hard choices so he said they could not guarantee fees would be scrapped under a Lib Dem government; but at the same time he wanted to show they cared by reiterating his support for the principle of scrapping tuition fees. This kind of ‘have your cake and eat it’ subtlety is lost in a media spotlight which shines but briefly and intermittently upon the third party. It is hard to act the grown up when you are fighting for attention, and when throwing a tantrum is far more likely to deliver TV cameras and column inches than quiet competence.
Despite these enduring challenges for the Liberal Democrats, it is clear that Clegg thinks they have come a long way and deserve to be taken seriously. “There’s a much steelier quality to the Liberal Democrats today” he tells me, a legacy of the party having participated in devolved government in Cardiff and Edinburgh, run large metropolitan councils like Sheffield, Liverpool and Bristol, and holding the balance of power in the House of Lords. He is right that if you look beyond the petty squabble over who has the keys to Number 10, the Liberal Democrats loom a lot larger. They got 28 per cent of the vote in the local elections earlier this year, considerably more than Labour, and while they may only have one in ten of the seats in the House of Commons, this belies the fact that they got one in four of the votes nationwide at the last general election.
It is difficult not to agree with Clegg that the system which keeps the Liberal Democrats down also smothers genuine difference between the two main parties, who are forced to vie for a narrow section of the electorate in a few marginal seats in order to make a majority government. Clegg sees firm battle-lines drawn between his party and the others, especially on progressive issues.
“We’re the only insurgent party in British politics”
The Lib Dems, he says, offer “a commitment to far, far greater social justice and fairness than either the Conservatives believe in or Labour has been able to deliver” and will back this up with “the most radical tax switch this country’s seen in a generation”. Further, he is proud of their “staunch defence of civil liberties” against an “astonishingly authoritarian” Labour government, and their “staunch defence of our internationalist credentials” against an isolationist Tory party.
One-to-one, Nick Clegg makes an excellent case for his party, neatly drawing distinctions that show the weakness of ideas in the main parties. I ask him what the difference is between Lib Dem and Conservative brands of ‘localism’ and his answer is direct. “One word: money.” He insists that, “as long as the Treasury has its clammy hands on the purse strings of the way we run this country any number of warm-sounding speeches from David Cameron won’t make the faintest bit of difference.”
Nevertheless, if rhetoric from the Lib Dems is ever going to become the change we need, the party will have to start thinking more seriously about how it can get a hand on the reins of power. Then there will be some soul-searching about how to stop power corrupting their ideals, but that is a conversation only a grown up party ever gets round to having.