Last month, we filed for a judicial review of the UK government’s decision to scrap its proposed plans to introduce reporting requirements for businesses to tackle food waste. The decision was taken by the previous Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Thérèse Coffey. Following the government reshuffle, the new Environment Secretary, Steve Barclay, has now agreed to review that decision, stating that a new decision will be made in the first half of 2024.

The initial decision was taken despite responses to the government’s consultation showing that the majority of businesses in scope were in favour of mandatory reporting, and 99% of respondents overall. We welcome the government reversing the decision but implore them to take quick meaningful action and make food waste reporting mandatory.

“We’re delighted the new Secretary of State has u-turned on his predecessor’s reckless decision to scrap plans to introduce mandatory food waste reporting for big businesses. However, we cannot allow DEFRA to kick action on food waste into the long grass, yet again. All the evidence supports the case for mandatory food waste reporting. The government’s climate and waste experts recommend it, the impact assessment shows it will result in cost savings, and the vast majority of consultation respondents, including the majority of businesses, are in favour. The time for delay is over – the government must introduce this popular, effective and no-brainer measure to reduce emissions and tackle the scourge of food waste during the cost of living crisis now.” Carina Millstone, Executive Director of Feedback

An estimated 10.4 to 13 million tonnes of food are wasted in the UK annually, equivalent to approximately 26-33% of the UK’s 40 million tonnes of food imports per year. A study from the University of Bangor and Feedback found that halving UK food waste would save approximately 0.8 million hectares of cropland domestically and overseas[iii], which Feedback estimated could produce enough potatoes and peas to feed 28% of the UK population their yearly calories.

Food waste is a key climate change issue, generating about 10% of global emissions. The government’s own climate change experts, the Climate Change Committee, advised that mandatory reporting should be introduced by 2022.

“Our clients are delighted that the new Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs decided to review his predecessor’s decision not to introduce mandatory food waste reporting. His decision must make sense given that all the evidence shows that the costs to the shopper of introducing a mandatory requirement will be massively outweighed by savings which would be achieved by reductions in food waste.” Leigh Day solicitor Ricardo Gama 

On 6 and 7 November we will be in the Court of Appeal for a judicial review hearing of the Government’s failure to ensure its Food Strategy contributed to meeting its carbon budgets.

The claim is being heard after we successfully appealed that the Government’s failure to budget its food strategy towards Net Zero was arguably unlawful under the Climate Change Act 2008 which says the Government must put in place policies to meet carbon budgets. We contend that section 13 of the Act amounts to a continuing duty to prepare policies and proposals that will enable the carbon budgets to be met, as was established by the High Court judgment’s last year into the Net Zero Strategy.

We believe the Government had a duty to adopt measures to reduce meat and dairy production and consumption in its Food Strategy published in June 2022. Advice from the independent body, the Climate Change Committee, states that reductions in meat and dairy consumption are essential to meeting the Net Zero Target. This should have been taken into account, or at the very least reasons for rejecting that advice (as the Government did) ought to have been given.

Tackling emissions from the food and farming sector is key for the government to meet climate targets, because the livestock industry is responsible for about 14.5% of global emissions and, if current trends continue, the global livestock industry will be using up almost half the world’s 1.5°C emissions budget by 2030.

The Net Zero Strategy published in 2021 stated that the Food Strategy would support the delivery of the Net Zero target, but the detail on how carbon budgets would be met in the food system was left to the Food Strategy. It is argued that, in finally developing the Food Strategy, the Government was required to complete that exercise under section 13, an exercise that last year’s Net Zero Strategy judgment found ought to include an assessment of the level of contribution the Food Strategy would make to meeting the carbon budgets and what risks there were to achieving that.

However, the Food Strategy neither addressed the emissions impact of meat and dairy, nor put in place policies for their mitigation.

‘We are confident our judicial review will establish that the government has a legal responsibility to put in place policies to reduce emissions in the food and farming sector. We trust it will compel the government to act on the advice of its own climate experts, who have said time and time again that meat and dairy reductions are required if we are to meet our legally enshrined climate targets. We hope that our case will be the high-water mark for the government’s disregard and denial of the measures it must urgently adopt and implement to avoid climate and environmental breakdown.’ Carina Millstone, Executive Director of Foodrise

A tumultuous moment for America from which sprung a community food initiative worth revisiting during Black History Month.  

1968, in the United States of America, was turbulent. The year’s unrest included the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy, violence at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago, the iconic black power salutes at the Mexico Olympics, and on-going protests over the Vietnam war. From this chaotic context emerged a grassroots initiative in Oakland, California, with a simple yet somehow groundbreaking offer – free breakfasts for children.  

These meals were launched in January 1969 by Rev. Earl Neil, a key player in organising the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, and held at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Oakland where he served as pastor. He ran the breakfasts under the banner of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP), a radical black power political organisation infused with communist ideology, recently founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. The BPP’s reputation centres on their militia style confrontation the police and armed patrols of Black neighbourhood, however their social mission to support the Black community is less well known about. 

The Community Survival programmes that the BPP ran were geared around empowerment for African Americans and reclaiming power at the social and economic level. As well as food these initiatives included providing transportation, education and healthcare services, alongside connecting people around cultural and sporting activities. “The food component of the BPP was a big part of our organizing.” Melvin Dickson, an organiser for the Oakland breakfast program said, “this included our free breakfast program. Because one thing you can guarantee in an oppressed community is that you’re going to find hunger.” Within a few months of the launch in Oakland, the Breakfast for Children Programme (BCP) was rolled out across the country by the BPP, feeding over 20,000 children in 19 cities by the end of 1969. 

On a basic level the meals addressed the self-evident truth that “children can’t learn on an empty stomach,” but going deeper, it’s clear the breakfast clubs successfully embodied an ethic of grassroots organising and anti-oppressive practice. Cooking and eating were entry points for discussions about racism, capitalism, and the possibility of revolutionary change. Corporate power was challenged too – after organisers unsuccessfully attempted to get the support of businesses to donate food, the Black community in Oakland boycotted dairy products at Safeway and forced the supermarket to get behind the effort to feed kids.   

Perhaps the clearest indicator that the meals made waves is seen from the way in which the authorities identified them as a threat. In an internal FBI memo, Hoover wrote: “[BCP] represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for”. In 1975, in a move widely considered to be influenced by the BPP, the US government started offering free breakfast in public schools. 

Image Credit: It’s About Time / BPP

So what lessons can Britain learn today from the BPP’s free breakfast programme? 

The Black Panther Party made food central to their political action because food, and hunger, have always been political issues. All too often in modern Britain, food support for hard up members of society has failed to face up to home truths about entrenched structural inequality, and instead treats the provision of food to those in need as apolitical acts of charity. In 2012, then prime minister David Cameron spoke in Parliament of ‘welcoming-the-work’ of food banks at the same time as his government’s austerity project pulled away the rug of social support for those in poverty. Since then, there has been a 10-fold increase in the number of food parcels being provided by food banks, and yet ministers have praised the effort required to meet the need as ‘uplifting’. This chasm between the political conditions of food poverty and the feel-good food philanthropy carried out by the political elite was epitomised last Christmas, as Rishi Sunak was photographed serving hot food at a London shelter. In these instances and many other moments in modern Britain, philanthropic food provision risks becoming political cover for structural inequality which is remedied and repeated without addressing root causes.  

The Black Panther Party also shows us how food is a chance for us to come together. Community meals are by definition collective moments that provide the chance for relational power to build – contacts to be made, background stories of others to be better understood and shared visions for a better future to be discussed.  Any grassroots campaign is stronger by placing food at the centre – as much as anything it makes it easier for people to attend if they don’t need to squeeze in a meal before or afterwards. On top of nourishment a shared meal is a chance for a conversation and connection, a hook for forming better relationships in the public realm. 

Additional resources: 

BBC World Service History Hour (2021) Black History: The Black Panthers 

Huffington Post (2016) The Black Panther Party: A Food Justice Story 

The Guardian (2019) ‘One of the biggest, baddest things we did’: Black Panthers’ free breakfasts, 50 years on 

Vox (2016) The most radical thing the Black Panthers did was give kids free breakfast 

Wikipedia entry on Black Panther Breakfast for Children

[Feature Image Credit: William P. Streater, Granger/Rex/Shutterstock. Bill Whitfield of the Black Panther party serves breakfast To local children in Kansas City, April 1969]

The COVID-19 pandemic made us more aware of the air we share between us. A hushed conversation between lovers, and its sticky heat of promise; the sliver of cool wind that blows in through the cracks of a crowded tube during a muggy ride; and the frosting, oh, the frosting! slick with air-droplets and birthday wishes, smeared atop a birthday cake after the candles are all blown out. My air is never mine, but yours, and ours. And as we yelled hello and goodbye at each other from 6 feet apart, it bound us together, like marriage, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health.

But when Black people started dying at a disproportionately high rate compared to our white counterparts, this pandemic reminded us that, despite possessing the same windpipe, and the same weary lung tissue, some air is ours alone to endure.  

To take a breath in London, as a Black resident, is to produce life from toxic air. A report commissioned by the city of London showed that Black people are living in areas with disproportionately worse air quality. Nine-year-old Ella Kissi-Debrah, a Black child with sparkling eyes from inner London, was the first person in the world to have air pollution listed as a cause of death.

The surfaces of our lungs have always been contested territory. Our babies’ first breaths are less likely to be heard by their mothers – black women in the UK are 4 times more likely to die in childbirth compared to white women. Throughout history, white supremacy erected oppressive structures across the world, from slavery and colonisation, to the imperial new world order, that suffocated us. Race scientists justified our asphyxiation: they ran biased tests on enslaved people to conclude that “the deficiency in the negro (lung)” was about “20 per cent” compared to that of a white person. Never mind that these test subjects likely spent months crammed into the hull of a slave ship, sucking on just centimetres of expired oxygen. The brand of a deficient lung still follows Black people around, from hospital to hospital, getting in the way of life saving diagnoses, treatment and disability benefits. It is through these systems and their justifications, that the levers of white supremacy enact Necropolitics– using political power to determine if we live or die, if we breathe or not. 

Each soul left gasping for air in a sinking dingy off the Mediterranean coast, is a political choice made by members of the European Union. Even as we bore witness to George Floyd’s murder, a live-streamed execution by suffocation, at the hands of American police, the Met Police still strangle our sons as a form of social control. When a Black woman in south London got into an argument with a non-black shop owner, he responded by throwing his hands around her neck. George Floyd’s last words to us were “I can’t breathe.” When Black people took to the streets in the US to protest police killings, they found their own throats closing up, as they choked on teargas sold to US riot police by UK manufacturers.  In this way, Black life becomes an appeal for air, if not for basic survival, then to simply have some space. Give me air! As in, let me be. Allow me pause. Let me think, and feel, and live, and love, and process; comfortably, without want; away from hardship, and violence, and scrutiny. 

Even outside of the smog city, and the riot gear, Black folk still find themselves battling for clean air. In hog country, eastern North Carolina, the pigs outnumber the mostly Black, Latine and Indigenous residents 35 to 1. Millions of pigs packed into factory farms mean billions of tonnes of pig-waste, which gets dumped, sprayed and crammed into the surrounding areas. What’s sprinkled into the air settles on people’s cars and clotheslines, into the backs of their throats, and into the swell of their lungs. In the shadow of the hog farms, breaths – and lives – become difficult to catch. The old men wheeze as they settle onto their rocking chairs. The young ones cough into the wind. 

The UK doesn’t have as many factory farms as the US, but meat producers are always angling for more. Our factory farms already emit tonnes of noxious fumes into the atmosphere. Continuing expansion becomes a question of how much more our government expects us to bear.  

But if the UK keeps building its factory farms, and rams the rooms with poultry, and swine, and  excess, what then must we think? What then of our Black Girls, and Black Boys, with their Black Lungs, and Black Fists, and Black Dreams? What then of the smog, the strangle, and the fumes that follow? What should we make of this all? What else will come after your factories if not clouds of toxic air like the ones we know from our cities? Whose lungs will they fill but ours?

During the last thirty years the proliferation of supermarkets across our every aspect of our lives has caused a seismic change in how we purchase everything from food, to clothes and more. At first an exciting time-saving proposition where food could be bought in one “big shop” rather than needing to visit lots of different, smaller shops, consumers embraced the convenience offered by these super spaces. It’s taken a few years for the damage done to sink in. High streets and local shopping spaces have been decimated, with greengrocers, bakers, and other food providers unable to compete with the one stop shop. This has been exacerbated by the expansion of the supermarkets into other territories beyond food. Clothes, household goods, bedding, plants, flowers and more. The smaller businesses can’t mirror the loss leader prices used by supermarkets because they don’t have the same economies of scale. Supermarkets are not rooted in communities, they move to wherever they can extract the most profit – they are not of the people so they can never truly be for the people.

There is a small glimmer of hope on the horizon, however. Communities are taking matters into their own hands and reinventing the high street with pop up markets that serve the local community in a way that supermarkets can’t. Indeed, these spaces are often notably where the supermarkets are not. Areas where the communities have been left behind with the boarded-up shops and need to travel to access the amenities they used to have within walking distance. A great example of this, which we are highlighting as part of Black History Month, is the Granby 4 Streets market.

Granby 4 Streets is in Liverpool. Toxteth to be exact. Most people have heard of Toxteth, but usually only in the context of the riots which took place in the early 1980s. There’s much more to it than that. Originally a deer hunting park for the Kings of England, Toxteth has a long history stretching back to the 12^th Century. Today it is a hodgepodge of gracious but dilapidated Georgian and Victorian mansions and terraces, mixed with new build housing; with long tree filled avenues that lead to the city centre. Traditionally it has been a multicultural area, on the edge of Chinatown, housing the first mosque and Islamic centre in England, with Greek Orthodox, Catholic, Quaker and Protestant churches, synagogues, and chapels offering a range of spiritual succour to inhabitants. It’s always been an area settled by people whose heritage included sailors, enslaved Africans and their descendants, and migrants from the Commonwealth . In this space you will find the Merseyside Somali and Community Association, the Liverpool Arabic Centre, the Kuumba Imani Centre, the African Caribbean Centre, and the Islamic Cultural Centre at Al-Rahmi Mosque. It remains the most ethnically diverse area of Liverpool.

The Toxteth uprising took place in 1981, protesting the police enforcement of stop and search measures which unfairly targeted young black men. Buildings burnt, windows were smashed, people were detained. The aftermath saw the stigmatising of the whole area, leading to a severe decline with boarded up shops and houses left to rot. During the 1990s and early 2000s, attempts were made to cleanse the area by demolishing the old Victorian terraces and building new houses to entice a middle-class community into this space, so close to the city centre. The remaining residents of the Granby 4 Streets, which were at this time mostly “tinned up”, referring to the security metal sheets covering doors and windows on the abandoned properties on these roads, came together to form the Granby Residents Association, which later evolved into the Granby Community Land Trust.

They resisted attempts to demolish these streets through community actions – working with artists to paint murals on derelict houses, planting gardens in the abandoned streets and hosting summer markets.  Liverpool is a charter city, which means markets cannot be held without express permission from the council. True to the spirit of Granby, which has always been one of act first, ask for forgiveness afterwards, these “illegal” markets evolved further into the monthly Granby Street Market, held every 1^st Saturday in the month.  Starting as a table sale, outside people’s homes on Cairns Street L8, the market now stretches the length of this road and has around 70 stalls, offering food, bric-a-brac, vintage clothes, and homemade crafts that reflect the diversity and creativity of the community it serves. It is now firmly established within the council’s calendar of markets, with brightly coloured gazebos, art, and music to accompany the browsing public. It is a fantastic example of community in action, taking matters into their own hands to rejuvenate and invigorate their environment. It is Black led, with people who of Black heritage proudly claiming this space as theirs.

What can we learn from this? It’s okay to take a risk, to take initiative and bring your community with you. You don’t always need permission, there is power in taking action. There are great examples of this across the world – look at the guerilla gardeners of Detroit, who faced with their city’s steady decline after the great automobile industries faltered, have reimagined their environment with urban farming, or agri-hoods, in derelict streets.

Closer to home we had Esiah Levy, a young man from Croydon who created SeedsShare in 2016. Esiah grew vegetables in his back garden, having learnt how from his Jamaican father. He saved the seeds and then swapped them all over the world with other gardeners for the cost of post and packing. Esiah passed away suddenly at only 32, but he left an amazing legacy of seed swapping and inspiration that led Edward Adonteng to write: “And for me, like a young black man, looking at someone I can look to and his dedication to his plants, based on what I’ve seen so far, is astronomical to me… Like, he’s my direct inspiration to horticulture. So, when you were talking about his legacy, to me it’s now my duty to spread his name, like the seeds, just spread it.” Esiah came to Liverpool in 2018, to visit The Grapes community garden in Toxteth and share his knowledge about how to seed save. That garden still exists. Food is still grown there; seeds are still swapped.

References

https://www.granby4streetsclt.co.uk

https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2019/11/05/food-community-detroit-garden-agriculture

https://gardenmuseum.org.uk/sowingroots/sowing-roots-esiah-levy/

“From the standpoint of the grower, the greatest defect of slavery lies in the fact that it quickly exhausts the soil. […] As Jefferson wrote of Virginia, “we can buy an acre of new land cheaper than we can manure an old one.”  

Capitalism and Slavery (Eric Williams, 1944) 

‘Sankofa’ is word of the Akan people of Ghana used to convey the idea that there is wisdom in looking backward to move forward. Sankofa is often represented by the minimalist symbol of a mythical bird, with its feet pointing forward whilst its head reaches backward to retrieve a treasured egg behind it. In January Natalie Lartey used the term to open our session on Reparations at the Oxford Real Farming Conference. It seems apt to re-engage with the concept for Black History Month given the challenging public discourse those who care about people and environment must now confront daily. We are desperate to know how to get out of this doom spiral, and I believe that a more careful study of Black history holds lessons for us all. 

New inspiration has rarely felt more desperate. Whether we should do away with our legal commitment to uphold human rights, and the degree to which it is ok to let Black and Brown people drown in the English Channel are serious political questions today. Credible plans with broad support to tackle climate breakdown and biodiversity loss are being abandoned. Corporate profits are greater than ever, while those who rely on wages, salaries, benefits, and state pensions to live are left with an increasingly grim menu of realities to choose from. And yet, we could all be forgiven for questioning at this time whether there is need to dredge up horrors long past, when there so many horrors in our present?  Why search for tears when it is hope that is missing? In my view, to see these two drives as being opposed is to miss the fundamental benefit of engaging with history. We must do this because the process allows us to connect our humanity to that of others. We gain an opportunity to reaffirm our values, reveal new avenues to act, inspire renewed perspectives on what we should be aiming for, and gain a better sense of the power we already hold. This is key for organisations as much as it is for individuals.  

Foodrise campaigns for a food system which is good for people and planet. In doing so, we often find ourselves working to hold corporations and policy makers to account for decisions which are demonstrably harmful or working with communities and activists to pilot alternative ways of doing things. Increasingly our daily reality and that of our peers is of a world where winning the argument counts for very little at all. Policy consultations appear to have little impact on decision making processes. Historical malpractice appears to present no barrier at all to future profits.  

Bringing Black History into the fold helps to debunk the idea that we ever successfully civilised agribusiness. There is an unbroken tradition, stretching back through colonialism to antiquity, of elites holding profits in higher regard than human lives or ecosystems. The transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans is uniquely responsible however for embedding the perverse economic logics we are now left grappling with within the food system – wasteful and polluting production methods, disposability of racialised people and the ecologies they rely on, the subordination of agricultural production to commodity markets, and malnutrition in the context of systematic overproduction. 

In August 1962 Eric Williams, an Oxford educated academic, became Trinidad and Tobago’s first Prime Minister having led the country through the post-WWII movement for independence. His work Capitalism and Slavery is one of the first historical analyses critiquing the presumed moral character of Britain’s abolitionist and emancipatory achievements. Systematically, his work outlined evidence that the abolition of the slave trade was only possible once it was clear doing so could hurt the sugar production of the competing colonial powers of France, Spain and the USA. As the world’s foremost trafficker of enslaved Africans, Britain could starve them of labour.  

He also paints a similar picture around the time of emancipation. Excited by the prospect of investment opportunities in the new republics of Abya Yala / Pindorama (The Food Sovereignty movement’s preferred names for the South American continent), free trade proponents pushed for the liberalisation of trade policy, breaking the Caribbean slaveocracy’s monopoly on the British sugar market. Unable to compete with lower costs and beset by rebellions and uprisings from enslaved Africans, and an organised nexus of abolitionist and free trade lobbies in the UK, profitability collapsed for the West Indian Interest, along with their resistance to emancipation.  

Once we dare to look beyond the rousing mental image of a morally triumphant Wilberforce, we are left with some stark realisations. The value of Black life, or indeed almost any life, has yet to be accepted as a valid basis to proactively and systematically curtail harmful industry. The oft cited fact that it was the enslavers and not the enslaved who were compensated is typically used to underscore viscerally that there is unfinished business on the matter. Yet rather than an aberration, this bargain should be seen as the core of the situation.   

This is where Williams’ opening quote, of Thomas Jefferson’s 1793 letter to George Washington comes in. Although the word “slave” appears nowhere in his letter, Jefferson was explaining the core of plantation racial capitalism to his friend, the first President of the United States: It was more profitable to acquire a new patch of land and then exploit the dispensable bodies of enslaved Africans, (who would quickly exhaust the land after a few seasons crops), then move onto a new parcel and yet more newly trafficked African bodies, than think about caring for Black lives or bringing life back to the soil. Thus, racial capitalism ruthlessly put financial gain above the care of their fellow living beings (be they African human beings, Native American human beings or the creatures maintaining the health of the stolen soil). 

Two hundred and thirty years later, with its capacity to destruct life increased by a century of fossil-fuel derived agri-chemicals, capitalism has still not acquired the ability to embed a respect for life into its systems of governance. Instead, many in society consider themselves post-racial – having grown adept at interpreting historical alignments of interests – as with abolition and emancipation – as proof of a universal rejection of barbarism by former colonial powers. For both the individual and organisations like Foodrise then, there are clear challenges levelled. Can we reduce our vulnerability to the allure of false narratives by striving to hold the fullest picture possible? Can we find where our sector has inherited a disregard for life, and in particular Black life? And by rejecting ahistorical narratives, can we become more effective in finding the sources of hope we are so desperately in need of? 

It is in this work that we find the cure to the pervading sense of futility. This is where we can reveal what systems need to rebuilt or restored, the relationships in need of repair, who should be expected to bear the cost. Moments like this helps us find ourselves amongst the chaos and underline where we, specific organisations and people with valuable strengths and particular experience, are needed. Tomorrow does not have to be even more bleak than today. All it takes is a small amount of courage and the commitment of some time. 

Over the course of October and beyond, we’ll be working to reveal our Sankofa inspired reflections on the unacknowledged roots of Foodrise’s work within Black History. We will strive to be courageous even where this proves harder than we might expect. Our attempts will not be perfect. They may not even be satisfactory. But this work is everybody’s to further and so we will do our best to play our part.  

As EU Member States prepare to decide on the recast of the bloc’s Gas Package, new analysis by Feedback EU shows that proposals to ramp up biomethane production to 35 billion cubic meters (bcm) by 2030 from its current level of 3.5 bcm are both unrealistic and risk locking in dangerously unsustainable agricultural, land use and energy practices.

Biomethane, which can be produced from a wide variety of feedstocks ranging from manure to food waste, is often presented as a “green” alternative to fossil gas by its industry proponents. However, as our analysis shows, the use of most of these feedstocks at the volumes proposed comes with significant downsides and unintended consequences such as encouraging more livestock production and food-feed-fuel competition.

The findings show that the production target of 35 bcm biomethane by 2030 set out in the current legislative proposal comes from a report authored by the biogas industry. Its ‘Gas for Climate’ report significantly inflates a target recommended by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and independent experts, which concluded that only around 24 bcm of biomethane could be produced sustainably by 2030.

“This appears to be a textbook case of corporate capture. It’s deeply shocking to see that the European Commission has ignored the assessment conducted by its own experts and is flouting the evidence by setting an unrealistically high biomethane target. At best, this target will be unachievable, at worst it will lock in dangerously unsustainable agricultural, land use and energy practices and could be an environmental disaster in the making. Member States must reject it or face unintended consequences which will impact on the EU’s ability to meet its climate commitments and food security over the coming decades.” Frank Mechielsen, Director of Feedback EU 

Feedback’s analysis also draws attention to the problem of methane leakage: a recent meta-analysis of 51 previous studies has found that methane emissions from the biogas supply chain are twice as big as estimated by the International Energy Agency (IEA). This means that currently the amount of methane released relative to total biogas production is higher than for fossil gas. It is therefore crucial that the Gas Regulation legislates for continuous emissions measurement and enforcement of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission prevention along the whole supply chain.

“Our analysis shows that the 35 bcm biomethane target in the current legislative proposal has been poorly thought through and fails to take into account the best expert advice. It will do nothing to improve energy security in the EU and will inevitably drive unsustainable practices in the farming and energy sectors. We acknowledge that there is a niche role for anaerobic digestion of unavoidable organic waste streams, but to be truly sustainable the volume of biomethane produced will need to be much smaller than envisaged by the gas industry.” Karen Luyckx, the technical advisor who conducted the research

Our lawyers have written to the Secretary of State for Defra in view of launching legal proceedings for failing to take meaningful action to tackle food waste. 

This follows the government’s announcement that it is scrapping plans to introduce mandatory food waste reporting, despite 99% of respondents to the government’s consultation supporting mandatory food waste reporting for large and medium food businesses, including the majority of food businesses. The legality of the consultation is being challenged on grounds that the government’s decision is not based on a reasonable or rational view of the evidence it received. The decision is also based on an inadequate impact assessment, ignores advice from the government’s own experts, the Climate Change Committee, and fails to take into account the emissions savings that would result from making food waste reporting mandatory. 

An estimated 10.4 to 13 million tonnes of food are wasted in the UK annually, equivalent to approximately 26-33% of the UK’s 40 million tonnes of food imports per year. A study from the University of Bangor and Feedback found that halving UK food waste would save approximately 0.8 million hectares of cropland domestically and overseas[iii], which Feedback estimated could produce enough potatoes and peas to feed 28% of the UK population their yearly calories. 

“The government’s decision to scrap its plans to introduce mandatory food waste reporting for large and medium businesses is perplexing at best, and potentially illegal at worst. Our lawyers’ letter to the Secretary of State sets out why she must reverse her decision, which flagrantly ignores her own evidence, the advice of her own experts and the preference of the vast majority of consultation respondents. Mandatory food waste reporting is a no-brainer, and the government can’t simply ditch it if it is to tackle the climate emergency.”  Carina Millstone, Executive Director of Feedback

Responses to the consultation highlighted the importance of mandatory reporting as voluntary measures have failed. 70% of the companies that signed up to the Food Waste Reduction Roadmap  were still not reporting data publicly in 2021. Furthermore, the need to measure farm level food waste was also highlighted; with a primary producer stating “There is a risk that if primary production food waste and surplus is not included in mandatory reporting that farmers will continue to suffer the costs of waste.” Yet the colossal amounts of waste at farm level continue to be ignored by Defra. 

Food waste is a key climate change issue as it causes about 10% of global emissions. To meet climate change targets the government must take meaningful steps to reduce food waste. Earlier this year, Feedback won the right to challenge Defra’s National Food Strategy on the basis that it failed to take into account ministers’ duties to cut carbon emissions. 

Olivia Blake MP for Sheffield, Hallam has this week tabled an Early Day Motion calling for the introduction of mandatory food waste reporting for medium and large businesses, for the whole supply chain. The EDM 1611 is signed by a cross-party range of MPs including Caroline Lucas.

The legal letter, which is supported by a coalition of social enterprises including Toast Ale, DASH water and Olio, argues that the government appears to have ignored expert advice, including from the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) and waste experts Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP). The CCC advised that mandatory reporting should be introduced by 2022.

Instead of mandatory reporting, the government is exploring the expansion of voluntary reporting run by WRAP until at least 2025. WRAP have themselves said that “mandatory food surplus and waste reporting are essential” because of the “disappointing” lack of voluntary reporting by businesses, and warned Defra in the government’s impact assessment that “enhanced voluntary reporting” would be “more expensive” than mandatory food waste reporting “with significantly less food waste being targeted”. 

The letter argues that the government ignored vital evidence relating to the potential cost savings arising as a result of mandatory reporting. The government had defended scrapping the legislation citing costs to businesses of implementing the regulations potentially driving food inflation – but the government’s own impact assessment found that food waste currently costs the UK £19 billion, and any costs from measurement and reporting of food waste would be offset by only 0.25% reductions in food waste.. The impact assessment estimates that food waste measurement costs only an estimated £19 per tonne measured, compared to an average £1,189- £3,099 savings per tonne food waste reduced. The impact assessment found that “unnecessary food waste is inefficient, pushing up the price of food for consumers and businesses” and that reducing such waste “can help food businesses cut costs, which can be passed onto customers”.

Mandatory food waste reporting also had the support of the majority of businesses. 79% of retailers, 73% of the hospitality and 67% of primary producers responding to the consultation backed the introduction of mandatory food waste reporting . Tesco have said: “Publishing food waste data is vital and must be mandatory if the UK is to to halve food waste by 2030”  and more recently said it remains “critical” . Reacting to news of the law being scrapped, Waitrose said they were “disappointed”, and Ocado also said they were supportive of mandatory reporting .

Emissions from industrial meat and dairy are heating up our planet. By 2030, the livestock sector will be burning through about half the amount we can safely emit to stay within 1.5 degrees of global heating. Similar to our historically outsized role in fossil fuel use, the Global North is eating more meat and dairy and emitting more greenhouse gases than its fair share. In 2020, high income countries had an average yearly meat consumption of 90.4 kg per person. The lowest income countries only consumed 11.9 kg of meat yearly per person. The impacts of climate disaster will be felt unevenly, with countries in the Global South– which eat far less industrial meat and dairy– bearing the brunt of collapse.

While the Amazon wildfires in 2022 put animal agriculture’s climate impact in the headlines, frontline communities, often BIPOC (Black, Indigenous ad People of Colour) and working class people in the Global North and South, are still harmed at almost every stage of the industrial meat and dairy supply chain. 

Our steaks are torching the Amazon and endangering Indigenous communities

“Today the Amazon is becoming a wood stove,” says Yoka Manchineri, an Indigenous nurse in the Brazilian state of Acre. The Amazon has been burning for some years now, and these fires are almost exclusively man made. What was once lush green vegetation, and home to Indigenous peoples and unparalleled biodiversity, is now trapped in a cycle of fire, beef, and greed– wiping out acres of ancient trees, and leaving Indigenous communities choking on the smoke.

Manchineri’s community in Acre has seen an increase in respiratory illnesses over the past couple of years, where the risk they face from the COVID-19 pandemic is compounded by their proximity to the Amazon fires. “Forest fires affect both our respiratory health as well as food safety,” she tells Mongbay News, “because we survive with nourishment from nature.”

First come the fires, and then the cattle are brought in. Meatpackers in Brazil and the USA often source their cattle from ranchers who require vast amounts of land to graze their cattle.  In fact, the largest meat packer in the world, JBS, has admitted to sourcing cattle from illegally deforested land in the Amazon. Brazilian NGO Imazon estimates 90% of deforested Amazon land is occupied by cattle pastures. 

Under former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s regime, land-grabbers and illegal ranchers were given free reign to sweep through the rainforest with little regard for the Indigenous peoples residing on their ancestral lands. Alongside risks to their health, illegal cattle ranching subjects Indigenous communities to the violence of displacement. Often, these communities fight back. The Mura Mura people of the Amazon take up bows and clubs and head into the jungle to defend their home against loggers. “We are sad because the forest is dying at every moment.” Handerch Wakana, a member of the tribe, tells Reuters, “We feel the climate is changing and the world needs the forest.” 

What begins in the Amazon ends in the supermarket: an investigation by Mighty Earth showed that chicken and pork products sold in Tesco supermarkets in the UK were linked to deforestation in the Amazon  and a recent Global Witness report also showed British supermarkets Morrisons, Sainsbury’s, Iceland and ASDA were stocking beef produced by JBS. While consumers in the Global North enjoy artificially cheap meat prices, it’s important to bear in mind that if the end consumer isn’t bearing the full cost of this product, other people and other ecosystems, often those in already vulnerable situations, likely are. 

Our steaks are produced in hazardous working conditions

Andre Ngute, a meat packer working in a Tyson Foods plant in Iowa, sustained a deep gash on his right arm while working elbow to elbow on the factory floor. When the pain on his arm wouldn’t go away after a week, Tyson Foods refused to cover any medical costs beyond providing him with bandages as, per company policy, he hadn’t been working at the plant long enough to have earned coverage. “I never went to the hospital” Ngute writes, “because I was afraid of the bills.”

Health and safety negligence is an industry-wide issue. Last year, we learnt that some of the people cleaning JBS meat packing plants in the USA were children. Over one hundred children, aged 13 to 17 years old, were cleaning razor-sharp saw equipment, mopping up toxic waste and working overnight shifts. At least two of these children were known to have suffered “caustic chemical burns”. Although JBS has since ended its contract with that particular sanitation service, hazardous work conditions and labour law violations are not uncommon in meatpacking plants. The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration found that a worker in the meat and poultry industry lost a body part or was sent to hospital for in-patient treatment about every other day between 2015 and 2018 – higher injury rates than occur in sawmills, industrial building construction, and oil and gas well drilling.

Meatpackers were especially at risk during the COVID-19 pandemic, where working in closely packed, confined environments made them more likely to get sick. An estimated 86,000 meatpackers caught COVID-19 in the US, and 423 died from the virus in the first year of the pandemic. Tyson Foods failed to close plants where there was an outbreak of the disease and – according to ProPublica – it did not implement the recommended safety measures after the outbreaks began. In Shelby County, Texas, over half of the reported COVID infections were associated with Tyson’s meat plant employees, resulting in a rate of infection four times higher than the state average. Furthermore, a lawsuit for the wrongful death of a Tyson employee due to the disregard of COVID-19 safety measures also alleged that a plant manager organised a betting pool on how many employees would contract the disease. 

In the UK, around 70% of workers in meatpacking facilities are migrants. Despite exposure to the same health and safety risks as their local counterparts, migrant workers are often paid less and trapped in exploitative contracts through subcontracting agencies.

The abundance of cheap meat in the supermarket is coming at the expense of these workers. With each price slash, meal deal and bulk buy, our retailers are telling these companies that their harmful business models are okay– and we are silently agreeing, as long as we have something affordable to slap over the barbecue come summertime. 

Our steaks are coming at the expense of communities living near factory farms

In Eastern North Carolina, pigs outnumber the mostly BIPOC residents 35 to 1. Living next to the pig farms hasn’t been easy for these communities. “We had wells, but the wells [were] contaminated from the hog farm,” says Delores Miller, who lives by one of these farms. “The smell, you can’t hang your clothes out, you can’t do nothing in the yard, and we won’t even talk about the yellow flies.” 

Animal waste from factory farms is stored in massive open-air pools, or sprayed onto the surrounding environment as “fertiliser”. The waste frequently seeps into the ground and surrounding bodies of water. The smell is often unbearable. Residents living close to these factory farms have reported higher levels of asthma; eye, nose and throat irritation; elevated blood pressure; and chest nausea– problems which get worse with the odour.  

At home, factory farms in the UK are dumping manure and carcasses into waterways, and emitting noxious fumes into the air.  For Nathan Jubb, an angler living by the river Wye in the UK, the once crystal-clear waters look gravely unwell. “This river looks so ill,” he tells the BBC “and I’m getting ill thinking about it, I really am.” The waste from the intensive chicken farming near the river Wye catchment has been seeping into the water, creating a “wildlife death trap” and posing risks for local residents who used to swim and fish in the waters. 

While these hazards are rarely felt from the cool embrace of the Tesco aisles in large cities, rural communities are grappling with the true costs of our country’s appetite for factory farmed meat.  

What next?

The environmental and social cost of producing and consuming factory farmed meat at this scale is immense, and is borne unequally by already vulnerable communities. The evidence is clear: high income countries must reduce their meat consumption, if we are to have any real hope of achieving climate justice. That is – reaching our climate goals, while accounting for and redressing the disparate harms related to climate disaster faced by communities around the world. This responsibility to act cannot rest on the consumer alone, however. In the midst of a global cost of living crisis spurred on by corporate greed, governments and retailers need to recognize the role they play in shaping demand for industrial meat and dairy. By using their power to radically restructure the current landscape, they can ensure that eating a variety of nutritious, healthy and culturally appropriate food –outside of industrial meat and dairy offerings– is an accessible option for all.