Food Fight Against Food Waste
Everyone knows that food fights are a waste of food. But on Saturday 24th April, Cardiff Transition East flipped the concept of a food fight on its head. At a secret location in the woods behind the Blackweir Tavern, 20 food-fighters went into battle using waste food from retailers around the city in Cardiff’s first ever Food Fight Against Food Waste.
Each year people in the UK throw away 8.3 million tonnes of edible food. If that food wasn’t wasted the carbon emissions saved would be the equivalent of taking 1 in 4 cars off the road. As well as household food waste, retailers and commercial operations bin a huge amount of food that is past its sell-by-date but still perfectly edible. Organisations like Fare Share run fantastic schemes to ensure that some of this commercial food waste is collected and distributed to homeless shelters and hostels. But as members of Cardiff Transition East found out on Friday night when they went bin-raiding, there’s still plenty left over.
Doughnuts, canned goods, pastries, cakes, quiches, fruit and vegetables all made an appearance at the food fight, which was filmed by local Cardiff film makers Green Dragon. The Food Fight Against Food Waste was designed to be a light-hearted way of highlighting a serious problem, and was one of a series of events taking place as part of the Cardiff Food Chain month a campaign designed to bring together people in Cardiff who care about the environmental impact of food and farming and improving the sustainability of the food chain.
The meat and dairy industry are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars and lorries in the world with the majority of the damage being done by cruel and intensive factory farming. Friends of the Earth have been lobbying for a new law that will stop using tax-payers’ money to subsidise the importing of animal feed and factory farming, and to instead support home-grown animal feed and low-impact meat and dairy production. At a hustings in Cardiff North on Saturday, the Labour MP Julie Morgan backed Friends of the Earth’s proposals for a law that would ban the import of soy animal feed from Latin America, and the Liberal Democrat, Green Party and Plaid Cymru parliamentary candidates also supported the measure.
The Cardiff Food Chain month has now come to an end, but the alliance of individuals and groups who care about food and sustainability lives on through the Food Chain blog. And anyone interested in finding out more about the Cardiff Transition East group that organised the Food Fight can email cardifftransitioneast@hotmail.co.uk. Transition Towns groups are informal and friendly networks of people who want to develop positive and sustainable solutions to the twin problems of climate change and peak oil.
For info on environmental issues have a look here.
