Food Waste: The Cost of Abundance

For centuries, food was too precious to be wasted. Not that people in the past were inherently more virtuous than we are, but because they had little choice: a poor harvest, a harsh winter, an animal disease outbreak or simply a sharp rise in grain prices could turn a family’s food supply into a matter of survival.

Bread, therefore, was not just one food among many. It was the product of the land, of labor and of a harvest whose bounty was never known in advance. People did not throw away bread, leave food on their plates or waste leftovers: these rules had less to do with any kind of ecological consciousness than with a very concrete experience of the fragility of existence.

From Scarcity to Abundance

That experience has almost entirely disappeared from the Western world. The agricultural revolution, increased yields, mechanization and eventually the industrialization of food production and processing gradually ushered European societies into an era of abundance.

Added to this was the globalization of trade: when a country does not produce enough of a particular food, it can usually buy it elsewhere. Seasonality itself has lost much of its power to constrain consumption, while modern supply chains allow supermarkets to replenish their stocks almost continuously.

For most Europeans, famine is no longer a concrete threat. The last major famine in Western Europe was the Great Famine in Ireland, which began in 1845 with the potato blight. It claimed about one million lives and led millions of Irish people to emigrate.

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In contemporary Western Europe, however, the age-old fear of running out of food is now a thing of the past. This is one of the great achievements of modern civilization, but it has produced an unexpected consequence: when food is guaranteed, it loses some of the symbolic and moral value that the possibility of losing it once conferred upon it.

Our grandparents did not need an EU-funded awareness campaign to know that a piece of bread should not be thrown away. They knew how to turn meat that was no longer at its best into a savory pie, or how to use leftover vegetables in a soup.

Throughout Europe, entire culinary traditions arose from this necessity: stale bread gave rise to the French delicacy pain perdu, as well as to the hearty Knödel and their many variations found throughout Central Europe. The art of making use of leftovers thus formed part of a genuine domestic economy, in which almost nothing that had been purchased or produced was considered beyond use.

This culture has been replaced by a culture of availability.

Millions of Tons, Minutes at a Time

The result is evident in the figures. In 2023, the European Union generated approximately 58.2 million metric tons of food waste, or 130 kg per capita. More than half (53%) came from households, ahead of food manufacturing, food service, retail and primary production. Waste is therefore not simply an accident occurring at the end of the food chain: it has become a characteristic of the system as a whole.

France offers a comparable example. According to data from the French Environment and Energy Management Agency (ADEME), several million metric tons of food are lost or wasted each year, a significant portion of it in private households. Germany is not performing significantly better. The contents of trash cans thus reveal a striking paradox: food is safer, more accessible and more abundant than ever, yet consumers have become much more willing to throw it away.

The food service industry provides shocking examples. At McDonald’s, for example, cooked products are subject to extremely short holding times once prepared. A hamburger is kept for 12 minutes and French fries for seven minutes. After that, they are removed from sale. A product that is perfectly edible can thus become waste within the industrial system after just a few minutes.

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So much food is now available, yet it is surrounded by an increasingly sophisticated system of controls: health and safety standards, traceability procedures, temperature requirements, storage rules and, above all, labels. The date printed on a package can easily come to be seen as a final verdict: once it has passed, the food is considered no longer fit to eat. Yet not all dates mean the same thing. A “use-by date” concerns the safety of a perishable food, whereas a “best-before date” refers primarily to its quality. In practice, however, many consumers treat both as a warning that the food has become dangerous. The paradox is striking: the more closely food is monitored and regulated, the less confident consumers have become in judging it for themselves.

When Giving Became Complicated

This development also raises the question of food donation.

In a traditional society, surplus food naturally found recipients. Neighbors, servants, the poor, relatives, pets or livestock could all become successive recipients of what was no longer needed by the person who had produced or purchased it. There was an economy of surplus: in both rural and urban areas, leftovers had value.

Even the most prestigious institutions were not exempt from this logic. At Versailles, the Bouche du Roi oversaw the vast apparatus responsible for feeding the royal household and those attached to the court. Leftovers were distributed at the palace gates. The lavish consumption of the Ancien Régime was thus part of a much more intricate economy of servants, dependents, suppliers and redistribution.

Today, food donation has become a much more complex process. To prevent food poisoning and ensure traceability, nonprofit organizations must comply with rules governing storage, transportation and distribution, while businesses must manage their unsold stock well in advance so that it can still be distributed.

Fortunately, the law is evolving. Following several high-profile scandals in which supermarkets were accused of dousing their unsold goods with bleach, French law has gradually established a framework for the donation of unsold food and prohibited the deliberate rendering of still-edible food unfit for consumption.

These rules have their justification, but they also reflect the peculiarities of an era in which specific legal and logistical arrangements are now required to accomplish what earlier societies did largely spontaneously: keep surplus food in circulation.

The same was true even in schools. For a long time, cafeteria leftovers could be fed to pigs, which were, in a sense, the final link in the domestic food chain. Today, because of health standards and animal-feed regulations imposed by the European Union, this practice has all but disappeared from schools.

What is disappearing in this way is not just a set of old habits, but a form of knowledge.

Rediscovering the Value of Food

The mother who knew how long soup could be kept, who could tell whether meat was still good, who turned Sunday’s leftovers into Monday’s meal and who never threw away an entire loaf of bread simply because it had gone stale possessed a genuine economic skill. She knew how to make things last and how to transform and preserve them. Above all, she knew that the money spent on something did not cease to have value once the item entered the home: it still had to be put to as much use as possible.

This household economy also had a moral dimension. It taught moderation, gratitude and a certain kind of respect. Telling a child, “Do not waste your bread”, was not merely about asking them to finish their plate; it was about instilling in them the idea that food does not simply appear.

Modern abundance has made this kind of teaching less necessary. When the refrigerator is full and the supermarket is five minutes away, leftovers seem easily replaceable. When bread costs only a few euros and a fresh baguette is available at any hour, yesterday’s baguette ceases to be a resource and becomes waste.

Yet it should be possible to retain the benefits of abundance without adopting its most irresponsible form. Things are, in fact, beginning to change. Awareness campaigns are gradually explaining the difference between the various dates listed on packaging; supermarkets are expanding their sections for products nearing their use-by dates and offering them at reduced prices; apps allow unsold food from restaurants and stores to be sold at low prices; and the doggy bag – long viewed as an American curiosity – has gained wider acceptance and has even been made compulsory in France.

This development, positive in itself, must not be reduced to another marketing trend. Food must once again be regarded differently: by learning to recognize what can be stored, cooking with leftovers, buying only what will actually be consumed and, quite simply, remembering that food has a value that does not disappear merely because it is no longer perfectly fresh or presentable.

Abundance has freed us from the fear of scarcity, but it should not relieve us of the duty to avoid waste. The ultimate stage of prosperity would not be to have enough food to throw it away, but to have retained enough common sense not to do so.

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