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It is estimated that supermarkets may waste up to 500,000 tonnes of food each year, mostly because it is nearing its sell-by date. Much of this food is still perfectly edible. We approached all the major supermarket chains to see if they would give us the food that they were throwing out anyway. (The food we were interested in was the stuff that was after its best-before date but just before its sell-by date, as it is illegal to sell or give food to people that is past its sell-by date.) However, they all declined. Some had legitimate reasons (some of this food is donated to charity) but the majority would not tell us why.
Of course, it wouldn't have been legal to steal food out of supermarket bins, so we had to find a new way of highlighting food waste to our group. We spoke to the government scheme the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) that had commissioned a report into household food waste. They found that the average British person throws away a shocking £424 of food a year.
So, for the first week the group received £424 worth of food to live off so they could physically see just how much this was. With no refrigeration they had to use the fresh stuff first and then ate the tinned and dried food afterwards. Later we provided occasional deliveries of food which carried a similar message about wastage – for example we delivered them food with the worse possible packaging we could find.
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