Why do we love waste? We use billions of plastic bags we don’t need and bin food we never eat
By JOHN HUMPHRYS
By the time I arrived at my house in Greece, it was late in the evening after a long journey on one of the hottest days of the year.
In Greece, hot means very hot. It was pitch black - no more than a sliver of moon - but I stripped off anyway before I’d even unpacked my bags, rushed down to the sea and fell gratefully into the water. Or rather, I fell into the plastic.
As I discovered the following morning, the entire length of the beach and the water that laps the shingle was garlanded with a million strips of the stuff - almost all of it bits of shredded carrier bags. They had been carried to the shore by a freak change in the tide, way out in the Aegean.
That was two years ago. I thought about it again this week when it was announced that all 33 councils in London had voted for a new law to ban shops in the capital from handing out free plastic carrier bags. Dozens of other towns and cities are planning to do something similar.
Many are following the heroic example of Modbury in Devon where, last year, every shop-owner agreed to ban them. This great movement is catching on around the world, from California to Germany to Ireland. And about time too.
We may, at last, be seeing the beginning of the end of the free plastic carrier bag. Not that they’re really “free”, of course. Nothing is. Anything that costs the retailer money ultimately ends up on our bills. But the biggest cost is to the environment.
The fouling of my pristine beach in Greece is a minuscule example of the incalculable damage these handy little throwaways are doing to the world.
The reason is simple: there are too many of them. No one knows how many are given away on a global basis, but it’s been calculated at about a trillion a minute. In these small islands alone it is a staggering 13 billion every year. And they all have to go somewhere.
Many end up, one way or another, in landfill sites. That might be fine if we had an infinite number of holes in the ground or if the bags decayed after a few years. But we haven’t and they don’t.
Most are virtually indestructible. We use them on average for about 20 minutes and they survive as rubbish for centuries. So they end up everywhere - and I mean everywhere.
I have seen them hanging from trees in an African rainforest, frozen into the fresh ice of an Alaskan glacier and even littering the beach of one of the remotest corners of the world, the Tasmanian wilderness.
And those are just the ones we can see. There are billions in the world’s oceans, from the Arctic to the South Atlantic, eventually torn to shreds and often swallowed by mammals and birds. Marine conservationists estimate that they kill 100,000 whales, seals, dolphins and turtles every year.
A whale washed up on a beach in France had dozens of plastic bags tangled in its intestines, including two from British supermarkets. They are, in short, a menace - and not only for the obvious damage.
Because of its sheer ubiquity, the throwaway plastic carrier bag may be the most potent symbol there has ever been of a society that has lost sight of something with which earlier generations were rightly obsessed. Waste. We use the word lightly. We scatter our conversation with it. But it has lost its moral force. Let me give you an example of what I mean.
Several years ago I was interviewed by one of our more upmarket Sunday newspapers about a book I had written. Rather frighteningly, they sent their most celebrated interviewer to do the job - a fierce woman with a reputation for skewering her subjects in print. I was duly skewered.
She “tricked” me into admitting that when I make a cup of tea for myself I do not fill the kettle to the top but boil only a mug-full of water.
From a two-hour conversation - which covered just about everything from childhood literacy to the state of the nation in general - she picked out that little gem to show that I am an eccentric character.
I was baffled then and I am baffled now. Why would anyone boil more water than they need? It takes longer for the kettle to boil (a waste of time) and uses more water (an increasingly scarce resource) and more electricity (bad for the environment).
But, of course, that misses the point. I was an object of ridicule in the eyes of this clever, sophisticated woman because it was simply very silly even to give a thought to such a quaint old-fashioned notion as waste.
That interview was nearly ten years ago and it would be nice to think that things have changed since then. I’m not sure they have. Most of us these days are conscious of how much energy we use, but that’s mostly because of climate change and bigger bills.
We are still a very long way away from viewing waste in the way our parents and grandparents viewed it - not that they always had much choice in the matter.
Almost nothing was wasted when I was a child quite simply because there was scarcely enough to go around. The historian David Kynaston has written a powerful book, Austerity Britain, in which he describes a nation after five years of war whose people were exhausted, under-nourished and poorly dressed - mostly due to rationing.
Even bread, which was freely available during the war years, was rationed. So was just about everything else. The bacon ration was one ounce a week.
My house had an outdoor lavatory and we used the South Wales Echo rather than enjoy the luxury of toilet rolls. But at least we had hot running water. More than a third of all houses did not - let alone a bathroom or indoor lavatory.
In those circumstances, the very idea of wasting food was anathema. So it remained, long after rationing had come to an end. The Sunday joint was made to last for two, or even three, days and every scrap of leftover food was eaten. Potatoes and cabbage became bubble and squeak, and stale bread became bread pudding.
On my first trip to the United States in the late Sixties I went to a restaurant called, for obvious reasons, The Big Texan. The minimum height for a waiter was 6ft 6in and the signature dish was a 72oz steak. Think of that on your plate. That’s the equivalent of a large leg of lamb.
The big gimmick was that if you ate the whole thing (with jacket potato, starter and pudding) you got the meal free. Many succeeded - there was a list of names on the wall, including that of a New York stevedore who had eaten two - but many more failed.
And, of course, the residue was thrown out. It epitomised the greed and waste of America that made me feel so smug about being British.
Thirty years later we have overtaken them. A government study a few weeks ago showed that the British waste more food than any other people on Earth: almost seven million tons a year. What is truly shocking about this is that half of it - fruit, vegetables, meat, bread and dairy produce - could have been eaten.
It’s not thrown away because it has gone rotten but because we buy more than we need and simply sling it in the bin when we realise we’re not going to eat it. For a typical family of four that means about £35 worth of food is dumped every week.
Lord Haskins, a former government adviser, calls it an “outrage” and he is right.
So who’s to blame? It’s partly the supermarkets. Haskins, who ran Northern Foods, which supplies the big supermarket chains, criticises them for their “beauty pageant” standards: refusing to sell any fruit and veg, for instance, that doesn’t meet their exact requirements for shape and size. God alone knows what risk we might be running by eating an ugly potato or knobbly carrot, but there we are.
They also trim a lot of meat and throw it away, says Haskins, ‘to make the packs appear pretty on the shelf’. And then there are the tricks to entice us to buy so much. The classic is the BOGOF: Buy One, Get One Free.
But it’s no good blaming the supermarkets. They will argue that they are merely doing what all retailers try to do: giving the customers what they want.
There’s a lot of truth in that. No one is forcing us to fall for it. We like supermarkets and what they have to offer. One study after another has shown that it can be much cheaper to buy food in local shops and markets than at Tesco or Asda, but we want the choice and the convenience, and that’s that. The problem lies with the kind of food we buy and what we do with it when we get it home.
We wanted to meet anyways. At least for that one day in the whole year. Minus our parents who still squabble, while in their 50s. A four month old toothless wonder kept us company. Wonderboy. Bundle of joy. Cherubic smiles. His kisses meant opening his mouth wide into your cheeks. Real kisses. Free of inhibitions. Free of reservations.
We’re eight cousins. Three of us – married, and with kids. Am the next to be married. My cousins may call me a madcap when I keep going back in time to Chromepet. To my granny’s house. To the sideyard. To the custard apple tree. To the Mango trees. To the jackfruit tree in a corner. To grandpa’s wooden writing desk by the window in his room where he would hate to entertain family unless it meant business.
Ideally we should have been meeting there. But the ills of globalization sure caught up with granny’s home too. For several years, she lived alone there after grandpa’s death. For several years she survived on the pension she received in her husband’s name and managed the house, with some help from neighbours.
She braved the occasional stories of servants killing home-owners to scoot off with their loot, murders happening a few streets away, and most of all, hostility of some of her offspring.
Eight of them. Add the step-siblings, the uncles, aunts, visiting relatives who found her Chennai home a convenient stopover point. And that makes for a mela. Eight of them in different age groups – living in those many different directions. With differences and dislike that multiplied by that many times as years rolled by.
Then the house got broken into. When she was away. The home was obviously too good a bet for thieves in the garb of human beings, waiting for their prey. My heart skipped a beat to even think of what would have happened if this robbery happened when granny was around. Not sure if it was one guy or more people who broke into the house. Granny was no longer allowed to stay there after that. She’s never felt happy at a single home afterward.
Only three years back, she sold off her house to divide that money among the eight.
And we, chromepet cousins lost our meeting point among the many things that were given away from that home, to offspring, to friends of offspring…et al.
So we got around last year, after some deliberation, and blew up thousands for a day and half for a collective stay at a beach farmhouse off ECR, although the beach was about 5-10 mins away. Enough to cause heartburn among elders.
That was one of the most wonderful get-togethers we cousins had. Banter n games. Laughter n love. Kids n fun. Photo-sessions. Food.
This year’s was a more modest meet at a new papa’s home, although replete with chatter, even as the elders suppressed their vexation a little. Miracles happened. Call it luck. A couple of us who had other engagements got around to working them ahead or cancelling them. So not one of us was missing! A bundle of joy kept the women glued to him. As for guys, they were glued to ….sigh…cricket. Thankfully not for the whole day! Bad light!
It is that time of the year in Bangalore when wrapping a bedsheet around yourself is just not enough to beat the chill. Am wearing cloth-slippers at home. Something my granny finds amusing. But an absolute necessity. The floor feels ice-cool. Chill gets at you from just about anywhere – the window gaps, the half centimeter gap between the door and the doorstep, from the ventilation window in the bathroom…
Winter has been a whole lot of surprises, turbulences and health tornadoes so far. But now, am just waiting to get over and done with that big thing called marriage. They say marriage changes your life. They say it brings with it a package of happy and sad, good and bad, and just about everything that has to change your life. Have even attempted flipping through Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus…but never went past a few pages.
For now, all I am bothered about is, who have I missed inviting? Who to post invites to? Who to send by mail? How many calls to make? How to travel in the Bangalore chill? How many will turn up? Is the blouse for so-and-so wedding saree ready? How much does the blouse-maker, a rare species, charge for all the altering you’ve to go back to her for? How to balance the myriad ego-games that play out in front of you?
How to manage the hundreds walking into the marriage hall that day?
Given a choice, all I preferred is to elope and get married. Probably that would’ve saved a whole lot of trouble for my parents. Given a choice, two signatures on a government register, is all I want in the name of marriage. God is witness to it anyways, whether you circle the fire seven times or not, whether you wear vermillion above your brows or not. Given a choice, I wouldn’t want to wear a sign of matrimony hanging from my neck. Given a choice, I would prefer a stress-free wedding.
But no, the last thing I know will be that. There is so much role-play happening around that I am at times amused, at times laughing, at times crying at the way I get tensed about wedding decoration, about what the hell I will do after the marriage when this new status of unemployment finally hits me. Wife means this. Husband means that. In-laws mean this. Parents mean that.
It’s winter. All I want is, to snuggle in my blanket, free of the chill outside. An uncle said he was surprised I was going through all this. Frankly, I am surprised too, for the independent woman that I am. Choice, they say, is also a matter of chance.
