5
Waste and the limits of capitalism
The concept of natural limits to food production is in many ways a simple one. It has become part of the assumed framework for much green thinking about food and climate change precisely because it is based in what seems to be such an obvious, common-sense reality: we live on a finite planet, and we only have the one. This is of course true, but as discussed in the previous chapter, the real question is not whether or not there is an eventual natural limit to production, but whether we are anywhere near that limit. Assessing this is not a simple calculation. While there are a number of expert attempts to carry it out, they have a tendency to disagree with each other: according to the IMF, for example, food demand is likely to outstrip supply by 2080, whereas other, more confident, predictions hold that food supplies then would still be sufficient even if the global population were to double.335
For Malthus, as we have seen, it was all about land use and space. His vision of the effects of unchecked population growth was of more and more land in Britain being cultivated, until the entire island was taken up with gardens. This leads on to modern neo-Malthusian concerns about crowding in ‘wild’ spaces like US national parks, and perhaps to a more general worry about physical lack of space on a future planet with a larger population. The disappearance of large tracts, if not absolutely all, of the planet’s landmasses under a continuous urban sprawl is a fairly common feature of futuristic fiction,336 while Malthus’ ultimate nightmare was indirectly dramatised in George Lucas’ Star Wars prequels, in which the planet Coruscant is completely covered in one big city. However, this isn’t really what coming up against natural limits would look like. Unlike Malthus, we understand that the planet’s complex ecosystem would not allow total cultivation, or indeed urbanisation: even if we wanted to cover the entire land surface with a city, or with gardens, the environmental strain would be simply too great. The concept of natural limits is therefore a measure not of physically how many plants could fit onto the surface of the planet, but how much can be produced without inflicting significant damage on the environment.
This is the approach taken, for example, by researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, who define a set of nine ‘planetary boundaries’, within which humanity can operate safely, but transgression of which could trigger harmful environmental change.337 Out of these nine, we have, they calculate, already crossed three: climate change, biodiversity loss and nitrogen depletion. This way of thinking about natural limits is clearly much more nuanced than Malthus’, but it does mean that a calculation of how much food we could produce, and whether our current production is nearing the natural limit of the planet’s productive capacity, is no longer straightforward or obvious. Indeed, since it immediately has to take into account not only space but greenhouse gas emissions, soil nutrient depletion, water resources and the effects of deforestation, it becomes extremely complex. These factors, while immeasurably complicating the calculation of the limits of possible planetary food production, are at least related to the extent of our physical resources, but they aren’t the only ones. If we imagine trying to calculate the total possible food productive capacity of the planet, it immediately becomes apparent that socially-determined boundaries are just as important as the physical expressions of intolerable environmental strain.
Socially-determined environmental boundaries: fitting capitalism on the planet
We have already seen in the previous chapter how signs of problems in food production like famines cannot be taken as signs of an absolute physical disparity between the amount of food produced and the numbers of people needing to be fed. While this might seem to be a common-sense reason for famines to occur, in fact the history of famines shows that they are rarely if ever about an absolute dearth of food, therefore affecting everyone in a society. While there is usually some food production problem (potato blight, harvest failure etc.), famines are socially-constructed events, in which who lives and who dies is determined by social rather than physical factors. If, for example, Ireland had had a different social system in 1845, while the potato blight may still have arrived there, the effect would have been very different.
When thinking about food production, a famine is the most obvious imaginable sign that a natural limit has been reached. An understanding that famines have to be viewed within the context of the social structure within which they occur also indicates that natural limits themselves can’t be abstracted out of the societies operating within them. Planetary boundaries act on societies, not simply numbers of people attempting to live on the planet, or indeed in a particular area. An example of a society considered to have crossed its natural boundaries – exceeded its carrying capacity – can illustrate the point.
The Maya are often cited as an example of a society destroyed by ecological collapse. The Mayan civilisation, a world of competing cities occupying the Yucatan peninsula in modern Mexico, thrived from around 200 AD until the ninth century, when one by one the cities appear to have been abandoned. The suggestion is that this collapse was the result of climate change, specifically a series of devastating droughts in the ninth and early tenth centuries. The Maya were used to dealing with water shortage, living as they did in a dry region, but the period in which they flourished had been fairly wet in comparison to the drier conditions beginning in the ninth century. More pertinently for considerations of what lessons we could learn from the Maya, it’s also argued that they made themselves vulnerable to drought because over the six hundred years of the classic Mayan period, the population had expanded to the extent that it was ‘operating at the limits of the environment’s carrying capacity’.338 The evidence for the droughts is compelling, and the archaeological evidence clearly shows the cities declining and then being abandoned. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the problem was simply too many people for the available resources.
Richardson Gill, the archaeologist who coined the idea of the Maya falling victim to overpopulation and drought, argued that millions of Maya would have died of starvation and thirst, but this isn’t necessarily the case. While the population of the area in the eighth century was probably at an all-time high, there were still millions of Maya people living there after the cities had been abandoned. The collapse of the Maya regimes could have been just that, the end of a particular society, rather than a full-scale destruction of a people. It’s also noteworthy that smaller, less powerful cities in the drier north of the Mayan territory seem to have managed to survive the drought, significantly at the same time as they seem to have experienced a shift in power away from the royal authorities to the merchant class.
The point is not that the drought would not have posed immense difficulties for large numbers of people living in the Maya territories, nor that the collapse of the Mayan cities did not entail some reduction of population. It is that it was the society in which the Maya lived which could not be accommodated within the natural limits set by the drier climate, not the numbers of people per se. The Mayan cities in the south were vulnerable in a way that their northern neighbours do not seem to have been, not because they were living closer to natural limits but because their rulers, intent on pursuing dreams of conquering the other cities, were spending their resources on war rather than on maintaining the complex water systems on which the cities had relied for centuries.339 Mayan society does indeed appear to have been destroyed by ecological collapse, but in the sense of ecological factors acting on a particular society, constructed in a particular way. A different type of society might well have survived it.
That the possible extent of modern food production is socially determined just as much as the Mayan response to drought becomes clear as soon as we try to quantify it, even in the simplest, Malthusian terms. The answer to how much food the planet could produce is of course dependent at a basic level on how much land could be used for food production, which raises questions not only about water resources, greenhouse gas emissions and so on but also about land ownership. We can only attempt to define planetary carrying capacity once we decide whether that is carrying capacity constrained solely by physical sustainability issues or by current land use and property rights. If we are calculating on the basis of existing property rights, we would have to exclude land used for non-food production, like golf courses, for example, and factor in their water use in our estimation of the water resources available for agriculture. This is usually done in estimates of available agricultural land, so a recent calculation in Nature has it that 38% of the Earth’s land surface is used for agriculture and much of the rest cannot be brought into cultivation because it has other uses, ranging from urban land to nature reserves.340 The point is not that these other uses are necessarily illegitimate, but that they are products of the social system. Under a different social structure, the golf course which is sacrosanct now could go from private property unavailable for crop-growing to prime agricultural land. The amount of land and its physical potential for cultivation would not have changed, but the social structure in which it might or might not be put to use would determine its productive capacity.
This is not a solely theoretical question. The idea that land in parts of east Africa has been destroyed by overgrazing, for example, is a commonplace one, and east Africa often appears in lists of those parts of the world in which people are already being badly hit by the effects of climate change.341 There is no argument about the catastrophic effects of drought in the region, but arguments about overgrazing in the area need to be viewed with the understanding that this is an argument about land use. The Masai have been being accused of overgrazing and destroying the land on which they have lived since the nineteenth century, when the British imperial administrators were open in their belief that the two options for the Masai were that they should ‘either alter [their] habits or disappear’.342 The problem was not that their way of life was actually damaging their environment, but that it appeared unproductive to the colonial authorities, and failed to fit into the Western duality in which land is either brought into intensive use or fenced off as a nature reserve. Viewed in one way, the Masai lands in Kenya are an example of how meat-eating is unsustainable for the planet. Without the colonial appropriations of grazing land for nature or hunting reserves, and without the effects of British imperial rule and globalisation, the Masai way of life could be seen as a sustainable strategy. The problem with Masai herding was not that it was destroying the land, but that it did not fit with the capitalist British Empire.
In considering the carrying capacity of the planet, what is under consideration is therefore not the number of people who could physically be fed but the ability of the planet’s resources to support modern capitalism. It has been pointed out that the carrying capacity concept itself does not take account of ways of life like pastoralism which are only accommodated within capitalism with difficulty, as is clearly the case with the example of the Masai.343 If capitalism were a particularly efficient way of supporting the world’s population in reasonable comfort, this would be a distinction without a difference; it is because this is not the case that the fact that physical boundaries act on social systems, not numbers of individuals, is so important. It is the gap between capitalism’s use of natural resources and a baseline use to support the global population which suggests that a different system could maintain that population without the environmental destructiveness which capitalism brings with it.
Food waste under capitalism
That modern Western food systems entail a considerable amount of waste is not a new idea. It has been estimated that in the US, 50% of all food produced is wasted,344 while in the UK, the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) concluded in 2009 that the average UK household wastes 22% of all food and drink purchases, 81% of which could have been avoided. (The definition of waste includes all food and drink discards, including inedible elements like egg shells or meat bones, so the waste is categorised as ‘avoidable’, ‘possibly avoidable’ or ‘unavoidable’ to distinguish between items which could have been consumed and those which would always have been thrown away.)345 At a global level, it’s possible that as much of a third of food produced for people to eat is not used.346
This level of waste would clearly have a considerable carbon footprint of its own; according to WRAP, the UK’s food waste accounts for 20m tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year, 2.4% of the UK’s total.347 On this basis, waste seems to be a major contributor to climate emissions, although it has even been claimed that an extensive programme to address waste, including using the land currently used to grow surplus food for reforestation, could potentially offset up to 100% of current greenhouse gas emissions.348
The waste issue also seems a particularly contemporary one. Even using the more conservative understanding of food waste’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, it apparently represents an easy opportunity to make a difference: teaching consumers to use up their food by the sell-by date seems much less of an uphill battle than persuading them to eschew meat or motoring. With the economic crisis from 2008, wartime messages of waste elimination also began to seem not only newly relevant, but an essential part of the response to economic and ecological devastation. The New Home Front by Caroline Lucas MP and Andrew Simms, for example, set out staples of Second World War exhortations against wasting food or fuel, or the ‘SquanderBug’ which ‘causes that fatal itch to buy for buying’s sake – the symptom of shopper’s disease’ as reflections of how these principles could inform how we approach our current crises.349
The measures proposed in this particular report are a mixture of individual and collective actions, ranging from campaigns to enable people to learn to mend and reuse rather than throw away, to government programmes to bring empty buildings back into use. However, while this is indeed a sensible approach to reduce waste within the current system, as an assessment of the wastefulness or otherwise of capitalism, it isn’t particularly helpful. In trying to work out whether it is our numbers or our mode of production which doesn’t fit on the planet, the cause of the well-documented wastefulness in the food system has to be identified. It does, after all, make a difference to the chances a different system would have of avoiding exceeding natural limits if the waste arose from factors inherent in the system or from laziness and greed inherent in human beings.
Fighting the supermarkets
The most visible elements of the food system are of course consumers of food and the places in which they buy it, and it’s not surprising therefore that discussions of waste have focused on individuals and on supermarkets. The questions of which of these two is considered the main source of waste, and how that waste arises, are, however, important.
That supermarkets have a malign effect on the food system and on local communities is frequently recognised, with discussions of their role in, for example, killing off town centres in favour of out-of-town retail parks, driving small food producers out of business or eliminating varieties of fruit and vegetables through an insistence on a particular size, shape or colour. In discussions of food miles and their contribution to climate change, supermarkets also appear, not unjustifiably, as the bad guys. Not only are supermarkets seen to be driving the development of air-freighted, out-of-season produce, but the development of ‘just-in-time’ delivery by the big supermarkets in the last decade has clearly made a significant contribution to road transport mileage. In 2004, up to 40% of all lorries on UK roads were involved in food distribution, following a couple of years in which Asda, M&S, Tesco and Nisa had all increased their lorry fleets by about 20%.350 This model of delivery, reliant as it is on frequent lorry trips to and from the supermarkets’ delivery hubs, has also contributed to a shift away from rail towards road freight, as unpredictable, varying loads, decided at short notice, are difficult to deliver using rail freight systems in which space has to be booked in advance.
Supermarket chains have enormous power over their supply chains, providing such significant markets for food products that they are able to impose more or less whatever conditions they choose on suppliers. It is this control over the supply process which leads to homogeneity in fruit and vegetables, as supermarkets insist on conformity to certain sizes and appearance, and also to a significant amount of wasted food. Malformed potatoes or unsightly oranges, rejected by the supermarkets, may be perfectly fit to eat, but the growers may not be able to find another market for the supermarkets’ leavings, and they may well be thrown away. In a similar example, suppliers of readymade sandwiches to supermarkets deal with extremely perishable ingredients, but are faced with supermarkets who refuse to confirm their orders until less than a day before delivery, so that they can respond to last-minute contingencies like changes in the weather which could affect demand. Since the suppliers are forced effectively to guess how much of their product they will be able to sell, there is a clearly a considerable amount of waste built in here, especially as some supermarkets make it a point of their contract that the supplier is not allowed to sell food the supermarket rejects to other markets.351
In their advertisements, the big supermarkets portray themselves both as wonderful places to shop and as hubs of the community. A recent, infamous example was the advertisement for one chain which was shot in a market where in reality the last fruit and vegetable stallholder had just been driven out by the supermarket.352 In the real world, supermarkets are the targets of a variety of different forms of community activism. On the waste front specifically, they are challenged along with sandwich chains by activists for the amount of food they dispose of at the end of the day, and the difficulty in getting any of this diverted to useful causes, like feeding homeless people, even though much of it would still be fit to eat. Ongoing ‘freegan’ activity to use the food the supermarkets waste, versus the supermarkets who may well instruct their staff to pour paint over discarded food, and who may even prosecute people found taking food out of their bins,353 helps to keep supermarkets in the forefront as a significant problem when it comes to food waste. For many freegans, this is the point, taking food from supermarket rubbish bins being ‘the propaganda of the deed’, inevitable in the sense that in a consumer society, struggle would always emerge over consumption practices.354 Their very existence is also increasingly disputed. The news that a supermarket chain is planning to open a new shop in their area is a prompt for many communities, not to break out the bunting, but to organise and resist. One of the best-known of these fights was the battle of Stokes Croft: the campaign against Tesco in inner-city Bristol.
I talked to Chris Chalkley, the Chairman of the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft (PRSC), in a shipping container in the outside workspace at the Jamaica Street studios where the collective is based.355 It’s a setting which sums up much about what makes Stokes Croft unique, from the Bristolian nautical connection to the general sense that you are in a place which has always, as Chris says, found an alternative way of doing things. Situated just outside Bristol’s medieval city walls, the area had long been a place for trading outside the taxable reach of the city fathers, but after it was heavily bombed in the Second World War, it became a site of urban dereliction, known for high rates of poverty, deprivation and drug use. On the other hand, it also had a large creative and squat community. The creativity in the area remains apparent. Not knowing Bristol well, I was worried on the bus from the station that I wouldn’t know when I had arrived, but when it came to it, it was obvious. I didn’t need the automatic announcement of the next stop, all I needed to do was get off when I saw the buildings covered with street art and the passersby with green hair or dreadlocks.
Chris himself comes from the south-west, but hasn’t always stayed there, travelling as far afield as the Australian outback, where he worked on wheat and sheep farms for a period in the 1970s. He came to Stokes Croft in the mid-1990s, when the crash in property prices enabled him and a group of friends to buy the building which is now the Jamaica Street studios. The People’s Republic of Stokes Croft, he tells me, was inspired by his experience in 2006 when he decided to paint on the fence at the property. People kept coming up to him while he was painting, asking if he was allowed to do it. In this case he was, as it was his fence, but he realised that their questions came from their experience as local street artists whose murals were being diligently painted over with grey squares by council workmen as fast as they could create them. The council was only a mile and a half distant, but they were too far away to understand the needs of this creative area and were only interested in damping it down. What was needed was a way of building change from the bottom up, a way to bring together people in the area who wanted to question the status quo, and so the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft was born.356
Since then, the creative side of Stokes Croft has become well-known, and there is a sense that it is going from an embarrassing spot of urban decay to part of an advertisement for vibrant Bristol. The council are trying to get in on the act, paying around £250,000 to put street art on a number of council and corporate buildings in the area, and I noted in late 2013 that among the buildings sporting street art along the main road was a mainstream-looking solicitors’ office. Chain stores don’t tend to be keen to locate in very rundown areas, and the rough reputation of Stokes Croft had kept the multinationals out. This was indeed part of its charm: when the area was designated a conservation area in the 1980s, it was because it was characterised by a mix of properties and small businesses. However, as Stokes Croft became less ‘rough’ and more ‘interesting’, this came under threat.
In November 2009, Tesco filed for planning permission to open a Metro store on Cheltenham Road, on the edge of Stokes Croft. (‘Some people’, Chris said, ‘would call it Montpelier [the neighbouring part of Bristol].’ He paused. ‘With good reason.’) The application was lodged in the name of a Bath solicitor, so the 50 or so local residents who received the notices weren’t concerned and the council received no objections. In February 2010, a resident got chatting to the workmen who were starting to refit the empty property and discovered to their horror who the real clients were. The fight to stop Tesco became a rallying point for the entire community. The campaign delivered 2,500 signed flyers opposing the Tesco to the council and went door to door to poll residents on their view, which showed around 90% were opposed. After the building was squatted to stop Tesco from moving in, there was, in Chris’ words, ‘a big old ruck’ where the police found themselves standing between the local population, who didn’t want the multinational, and the ‘corporate thugs’. The site was like a military camp, surrounded by steel fencing and occupied round the clock by security guards, while the workmen finished and the anti-Tesco campaign fought a rearguard action on everything from shopfront signage to refrigerator size.357
In the end, however, the council voted by four to three to allow the shop to open. Refusing permission would have been an act of courage which would have set an example for councils everywhere, but one which the council just weren’t prepared to perform. As one (unnamed) councillor said to Chris, outside the barricaded Tesco, ‘We dare not refuse Tesco planning permission, because if we do, they will appeal, and they will win on appeal, and then I will have wasted massive sums of taxpayers’ money’. The shop opened in 2011, only to be trashed in the riots which broke out in Stokes Croft, as in much of the UK, in August of that year. The riot in Stokes Croft had complex causes, but it is known locally as the ‘Tesco riot’, in recognition of the issue which had brought the community together and out onto the streets.
The active phase of the campaign against Tesco in Stokes Croft may have ended, but the work of the PRSC continues. What is important, Chris says, is that people have to take on the issues in their local area, and start thinking about not only what they dislike about the current system, but about what they do would do differently. Bristol is increasingly at the forefront of attempts to build an alternative food system and possibilities for the future include a food hub for Stokes Croft. In the meantime, on the wall overlooking the Tesco, a huge mural reminds would-be shoppers to ‘Think local, boycott Tesco’. It is not a monument to a failed campaign, but a continuing engagement with the community which makes sure that the presence of Tesco does not become normal. Chris tells me that he doesn’t shop in any supermarkets any more.
The battle of Stokes Croft was one of the more prominent campaigns against a supermarket moving into a community, but it is far from the only one. Indeed, when I visited Stokes Croft, I received a sense both of the radicalising power of campaigns like the fight against Tesco and of how widespread these can be. Chris’ mother, a sprightly lady in her 80s, dressed from hat to shoes in scarlet, was at the PRSC helping out in the shop. I explained why I had come and she told me enthusiastically about the campaign she was involved with where she lives in genteel Cheddar, in Somerset, against a Tesco opening. They had succeeded for the moment, she told me, although Tesco still owned the land so they hadn’t relaxed yet. The only unfortunate downside to the Cheddar campaign was that they had not managed to keep all supermarkets out; while the campaign against Tesco was at its height, Sainsbury’s had managed to sneak in, almost unnoticed, on the other side of town.
When feeling against the effects of the supermarket chains is so strong, it would seem obvious that popular discussions of the problem of food waste, and its possible solutions, would focus around the wasteful practices of Tesco, Sainsbury’s et al. It is interesting therefore to note how supermarkets do not, in fact, appear as the primary villains in many discussions of food waste. In part, the focus on individual consumers and their buying and eating decisions mirrors the shift in discussions of food and climate change more generally away from issues of transport and packaging towards seeing the problem as inherent to certain types of food. It is notable, for example, that while plastic packaging would have appeared in the past as one of the major environmental sins committed by the supermarkets, with high-profile campaigns like the Women’s Institute’s packaging day of action in 2006 encouraging consumers to reject excess packaging,358 now, according to WRAP, packaging waste is comparatively less significant than the waste of the food itself. In other ways also, discussions of food waste reflect the overconsumption view of food and climate change.
The wasteful individual as bad guy
Households are only responsible for about a third of all food waste,359 but discussions of the waste issue have a tendency to become discussions of individual wasteful behaviour. So, for example, Gordon Brown made headlines in July 2008 when he accompanied the launch of a Cabinet Office review of food policy with exhortations for people to throw away less food,360 while the role of supermarkets in food waste was discussed primarily in terms of a debate over whether banning ‘buy one get one free’ promotions, otherwise known as ‘encouraging unnecessary food purchases’, would be a good idea.361 In this view, food waste arises because we all buy too much food: ‘In truth, we have simply become lazy and negligent about food, and we are blind to the true costs of wasting it’.362
This comment points to a common assumption about the source of food waste: that food is wasted because it is cheap.363 It is difficult to find empirical proof for this assumption, reflecting as it does a market view of the world in which everything is valued by its end-users according to what it has cost, and which also appears in other contexts, like debates about so-called ‘disposable’ fashion from cheap outlets, so that increases in clothing waste are dubbed ‘the Primark effect’.364 Indeed, as well as arising from cheap food, with a neat circularity, food waste is sometimes also presented as evidence for the existence of an oversupply of cheap food. You would think that an oversupply of food was by definition waste, but what is meant here seems to be not that food is produced and wasted through not being sold, but that it is so cheap that consumers buy it almost so that they can throw it away in an orgy of consumer indulgence.365
The concomitant of the idea that cheap food enables us to buy things we aren’t going to consume is, of course, that we might consume them even though we don’t need them. ‘Overeating to obesity’ is, as discussed in chapter three, a central part of current definitions of overconsumption, in which sustainable eating is eating only the daily recommended calorific requirement and not a mouthful more. The progress of the wasteful individual, from supermarket to dustbin, is neatly summed up by Ian Roberts and Phil Edwards in their The Energy Glut: supermarket free-parking encourages us to drive there, and because we don’t have to carry it home, ‘consequently, we will buy a lot more food than we need. We will eat some of it and waste some of it. The extra food we eat will make us fat and the food that we waste will be dumped in landfill sites where the rotting vegetable matter will release methane, a potent greenhouse gas.’366
This model allows considerable persuasive power to food retailers, whether it is their buy in bulk offers or their cunning car parking, but it is still the responsibility of the consumer to resist them in order to avoid waste. The supermarkets are, it seems, encouraging their customers to give in to their most base urges, in Tim Lang’s phrase, ‘colluding’ with them,367 in what begins to seem a struggle between the id and the superego, played out in the aisles. The notion that we will waste as much food as we can unless strictly regulated seems to borrow from the dieting canon the assumption that uncontrolled behaviour when it comes to food will always be excessive and destructive. It is important because it locates the origin of food waste squarely in the innate properties of human beings, not human beings under capitalism.
Wastefulness: biology or capitalism?
Roberts and Edwards make this particularly clear: according to them, we are programmed to be this way by our evolution: ‘The desire to eat whatever food is available and the ability to store excess energy as fat is hard-wired into our biology’.368 This is not the place to discuss how dubious is the notion that any behaviour is ‘hard-wired’ into our brains, nor indeed the unfortunately pervasive idea that modern social norms can be traced to homo sapiens’ history on the African savannah. It is sufficient to note that this interpretation places the consumer and their desires at the heart of the food system, while the supermarkets, however cunning and tempting, are of secondary importance in terms of waste.
This seems a considerable underestimation of the importance of supermarkets in food waste. They aren’t simply places where we can overbuy, but stores whose business model is based on procedures which entail wastage. The constant availability of a wide range of products, whatever the time or season, is a significant way in which the supermarket chains compete with each other: when Julie Hill, author of The Secret Life of Stuff, suggested to a supermarket senior executive that ‘the best thing the store could do for the environment was to run out of food from time to time…this was met with a frosty silence’.369 The obvious rejoinder is that supermarkets are pushed into this by the demands of their customers, by ‘the abundance model [which] has been built into consumer culture’,370 but this is to concede too much to the idea that demand drives supply. It is true that Tim Lang, in this quotation, is viewing this consumer culture as the creation of supermarkets among others; the passive building of the abundance model was carried out by the businesses now benefiting from it. But the notion that even if started by business interests, a consumer culture of demand for constant gratification compels businesses to satisfy it, overestimates consumer power compared to business power in this scenario. That consumers ever clamour to be able to buy strawberries at 3am in January is debatable, and it is difficult to sustain a convincing argument that it is such desires on the part of consumers which lie behind the food waste problem.
It is easy to see why figures like Gordon Brown might be in favour of the view in which the market is merely responding to what consumers want, and could be brought to act differently if consumers managed to have different, less wasteful demands. Other commentators, less wedded to the free market than our exPrime Minister, have varying degrees of faith in the power of consumers to change supermarket practices, ranging from the comment that ‘Supermarkets do actually listen to their clientele’,371 to suggestions for government regulation so that rather than giving consumers the choice of a green product, every product would be a green choice,372 to the disciplined circumvention of supermarket blandishments recommended by Roberts and Edwards. While there are various prescriptions, what they share is an underlying view of the origins of waste which holds that individuals are the source of waste as a result of their wasteful behaviour; and that however much this is encouraged to serve the needs of consumer capitalism, it would presumably be a problem to be strenuously overcome regardless of the system they were in. The implication of the concentration on the wasteful individual is that, whether waste could be dealt with without changing the system, or whether the conclusion is that the system needs to change, human greed and laziness would always have the potential to create similar problems.
If this were the case, we would have to conclude that, while we might be able to trace waste at points in the food system to the particular workings of the market under capitalism, the issue for natural limits would be not capitalism, but human behaviour. If we have a culture of wasteful abundance which puts strain on our finite resources because humans are programmed to it by their evolution, it would be difficult to argue that any system with which we might replace capitalism would be significantly less wasteful than the system we have now. We would be back, in fact, at a Malthusian conclusion in which the existence of humans who give rein to their desires is the root of the problems for the planet. The nature of the profligacy may have shifted from breeding to eating, but in borrowing the dieting world’s fear that people (especially fat or formerly fat people) will eat the world unless prevented, discussions of food waste which locate the problem with the individual show themselves to be surprisingly close to the views of Malthus when it comes to carrying capacity. In order for them not to destroy the world, working-class people have to recognise their profligate urges and exercise prudential restraint. Now, where have we heard that before?
If we conclude that we see waste within capitalism as arising from individual behaviour, rather than from aspects of the capitalist system itself, it should follow that other systems would also suffer from problems of waste and overconsumption. As we have seen from the example of the Maya, there have been environmental crises throughout human history, and it is possible to argue that various human societies have had significant deleterious effects on their environments. The role of various pre-modern societies in significant deforestation, from Easter Island to Celtic Britain, is just one well-known example of how different cultures have arguably damaged their environments, long before the development of capitalism. There is an argument, in fact, that we should consider the environmental destructiveness of capitalism not because it is a uniquely destructive system, but simply because it is the system we have. Our concentration on capitalism, in this view, should not blind us to the possibility that other systems could be just as destructive.373 The wastefulness of the capitalist food system would therefore not necessarily be solved by replacing capitalism, but would represent a way in which we would be up against our natural limits whatever system we were in.
Industrialism as the source of environmental strain
It is clear, of course, that industrial societies have placed much more strain on their environments than non-industrial ones, and climate change is easy to understand as a crisis of industrialisation. In food production specifically, it is again a specifically industrial food production system which can be seen to have brought us to the limit of the planet’s productive capacity. Broadly speaking, it is industrialisation which has enabled food production on a scale which has created the modern ‘cheap’ food phenomenon. That average household spending on food in the West is much lower than in the early twentieth century is an often-repeated fact, (although it is also one which should be treated with some caution, since it fails to take into account the possibility that other calls on the household budget might also have changed in price, for example housing). If consumers waste food because it is so cheap, this line of reasoning could force us to conclude that it is industrial society, rather than capitalist society specifically, which does not fit on the planet.
The Industrial Revolution arose, of course, within capitalism. It owed its existence to the way in which the transition from feudalism to capitalism had allowed the accumulation of capital to then be invested in the development of industrial machinery. The fact that industrialisation was a creation of capitalism does not mean that industrial civilisation could not exist under any other system, but whether industrial production would always inevitably be as destructive as under capitalism is a deeper question.
It is also a rather unfashionable one. It was a principle of the Stalin-era and later Soviet Union that it was capitalist relations of production which caused environmental harm, and that this could not possibly apply to their industrial development. This was clearly not the case, and the legacy of pollution and industrial contamination over large areas within the former Soviet Union, highlighted by but not restricted to the Chernobyl nuclear accident, has shown how damaging the effects of Soviet industrialisation were. There is no shortage of comments on how wrong it was to assume that ‘socialist’ industrial production was immune from the environmental damage inherent in capitalist production, so for example, this statement from a Soviet commentator in 1980 was quoted by a Rand Corporation writer in 1993 as a demonstration of how tragically blinded by ideology Soviet thinkers had been: ‘Like other global problems, those of ecology have a social origin, their solution largely depending on the character of the social system…The socialist states and the communist parties proceed from the conviction that the socialist system offers the optimal possibilities for resolving these problems.’374 However, the question is not whether the Soviet authorities were wrong about the potential for environmental harm from their industrial production – as they patently were – but why they were wrong.
It could be concluded from the Soviet example that it is industrialisation and not capitalism which is particularly destructive to the environment. An important development of industrialisation is the transfer of production from human hands to machines, which enables enormous increases in the amount of possible production. Resource extraction by people with hand tools is limited to their labour power, maintained by the resources available to feed them, but once machines are introduced, the increases in labour productivity mean that many more resources can be extracted for use: production is no longer limited to the unaided labour power of those working on it. It is this which has enabled capitalism to use energy stored from past eras, for example by mining, as well as using the immediate energy which we are getting now, ultimately from the sun.375 If the scale of production which industrialisation enables is seen as the origin of our environmental problems, the solution would have to involve changes in that production. The implication of this line of argument is that a society existing within the planet’s natural limits would have to be a post-industrial one, whether or not it was also post-capitalist. In terms of food production, this would have severe implications for how many people could be fed sustainably, given the scale of food production enabled by industrialisation.
However, it is worth noting that the Soviet regime cannot be taken as evidence that the problems of industrial production go beyond capitalism. Soviet Russia and associated states should more accurately be described as ‘state capitalist’, not as socialist; their industrial development is not a demonstration of how industrial societies might function outside capitalism.376 While the historical development of industrialisation cannot be separated from capitalism, this does not mean that industrial production of any type would always be as transgressive of natural limits as current industrial production under capitalism. In fact, the particular workings of capitalism make it uniquely profligate of resources and destructive of the environment, for reasons which are not simply related to the technology of which it has enabled the development.
The problem with industrial production from an ecological point of view is the intensive resource use which it enables. This is an uncontroversial statement, but it carries within it the assumption that in human societies, resource use will always increase to the maximum permitted by the technology available. In other words, we will always exceed the limits of our environment if we can invent a way to do it. This seems to return us to the idea of inherent greed, or at least profligacy, of humans as the fundamental problem. On examination however, the assumption here is not about the fundamentals of human nature, but about capitalism.
The unique destructive power of capitalism
In discussions of overconsumption from Galbraith on, it’s accepted that modern capitalism is associated with growth, but it tends to be presented as a lifestyle choice which capitalism could learn to do without. Growth is something which capitalism is ‘obsessed with’, or ‘makes a fetish of’. It is a familiar form of argument in environmental issues – journalistic descriptions about how as a society we’re ‘addicted’ to oil, for example – and the problem in all its manifestations is the same, that it reduces an aspect of the structure of a society to the individual proclivities of its members. Capitalism is not ‘obsessed with’ growth because particular capitalists believe that continual growth is essential, any more than we are dependent on oil as a result of individuals’ continued car ownership. Growth is part of the structure of capitalism; indeed, without continued expansion, capitalism does not work at all.
Capitalism is not a static but a dynamic system, which works only on the basis of ever-increasing profits. Competition between capitalist businesses impels each to seek expansion to outdo their competitors – the drive to greater and greater accumulation – but the profits generated by this are effectively dead capital if they cannot themselves be invested in a way that will get the capitalist a compound return on their investment. It is this underlying dynamic in capitalism which drives the cycles of boom and bust, expansion and depression, of which we’ve all had a potent reminder in the last few years. These aren’t a malfunction of capitalism but simply a result of how the system works. Because the need for growth arises from the need for competitive advantage, an explicit belief or not in the value of growth within the system will not change it: even chief executives who talk the talk on green issues are still looking for ways to become more profitable than the other businesses in their industries, and to beat them to new areas into which to expand. Industrialisation comes in here because mechanised production initially allows those capitalists who adopt it to produce larger quantities of products more cheaply than their competitors, although it also contains the seeds of the next cyclical ‘bust’ by causing the rate of profit to decline. Marx showed how this happens as companies invest their profits – the surplus value produced by the labour of their workforces – in machinery and thus convert it from productive capital. As the rate of profit falls, this is another driver of expansion, but is solved until the next cycle when many businesses in a sector collapse, and their surviving rivals improve their rates of profit by eating the corpses.
The adoption and development of mechanised production under capitalism is then undertaken in search of competitive advantage: any benefits to society in general, in terms of cheaper food production, improved health technology and so on, are as incidental as the damage caused by industrial production is unconsidered. A system in which industrial production was employed for the good of society, rather than for the profit motive, might have a different environmental effect, particularly if the need for profit was not also standing in the way of the development of technologies to avoid greenhouse gas emissions. The problem is not, however, purely one of scale: while a lesser volume of capitalist production would be less harmful, it is clear that the damage which capitalism causes to the environment is not in linear relationship to its size.
The problem with capitalist production is not merely quantitative, but qualitative. As John Bellamy Foster recently pointed out, ‘it is easier for the system to grow by producing depleted uranium shells to be used in imperialist wars or by expanding agribusiness devoted to producing luxury crops to be consumed by the relatively well-to-do in the rich countries than it is to protect the integrity of the environment or to provide food for those actually in need’.377 In this example, the division is between undesirable activities which involve the production of profitable goods, and the more socially-useful, which do not, but this is not the only qualitative problem with capitalism.
As Marx identified, the birth of capitalist agriculture in the nineteenth century entailed the transformation of aspects of the natural world into commodities, whose value was not their use-value but the profit they represented for the capitalist. As industrial agricultural production grew, driven by the search for greater profits, and as the separation between the industrial town and the countryside widened, agriculture in western Europe ceased to be a self-sustaining system. A metabolic rift had developed, as the scale and techniques of industrial agriculture removed nutrients from the soil without replacing them. Because the industrial system did not try to find ways to reuse and replace these nutrients, they were instead allowed to become pollutants as urban waste, while in the meantime the soils were becoming exhausted. The solution, in capitalism, was not to review the way in which industrial agriculture was developing, but to replace the soil nutrients which were progressively being lost by extracting them from elsewhere. The nineteenth century saw the development of the Peruvian guano trade, in which vast amounts of guano deposits were imported from Peru to Europe to serve as fertiliser. This removed natural resources from one part of the world for them to become a pollution problem elsewhere, at enormous human cost to the workers on the guano and those who suffered from the associated destruction of the Peruvian economy through the involvement of Western governments in the country.
The history of the Peruvian guano trade is an important illustration of the consequences of the metabolic rift. It also illustrates how it is that capitalism has such destructive power compared to other modes of production. It’s easy to assume that the global reach of capitalist business in the last two centuries is simply a product of improved transport and communications, but in fact this is a key attribute of capitalism. Western imperialism has always been driven by the needs of capitalism for expansion, for new sources of cheap labour as a result of the declining rate of profit, or for new natural resources to exploit. As the history of imperialist intervention around the world has demonstrated, this exploitation of labour and natural resources has not tended to include concern for the long term effects on the society and land: capitalism’s model is to take what it wants and move on. It is this which is at the heart of capitalism’s unique ability for large-scale destruction. Elites in other modes of production may not care any more than capitalist elites do for the long term wellbeing of the people they dominate, but they have perforce to take more care of the natural resources they hold. The difference is because of the mobility of capitalism.
Commodification means that very different products are essentially exchangeable: a capitalist can make profits from, for example, palm oil production in Malaysia, but can take those products and invest them in in a completely different sector on the other side of the world. Under any other mode of production, members of an elite who were enriching themselves from palm oil production would have to care about the prospects for continuing that enrichment in the long term, or their days as a wealthy elite would be numbered. It is only in capitalism that those same elites can extract their profits and move on, leaving others to worry about the mess left behind them. This is not to argue, of course, that rulers in other modes of production have been universally ecologically-minded, if only from self-interest. Far from it: many human systems other than capitalism have managed to destroy or at least threaten the environments which sustained them. Soil exhaustion, for example, was not a problem first known in western Europe under capitalism in the nineteenth century, but had been an issue at various times under feudalism as well. The point, however, is that elites whose power ultimately rests on their possession of particular land, and exploitation of the labour of particular populations, find themselves in trouble if those lands cease to be productive. In capitalism, global elites have learnt that their resources can also be global: their power is not based on the control of particular areas or resources, but of capital itself. There is no inbuilt need for them to take care of any particular environment, and no obvious short-term penalty if they fail to do so. That the consequences only arrive when the entire global environment is under threat is the root of capitalism’s destructive power.
Food waste as a source of profit
The conclusion that it is all capitalism’s fault is not a particularly rare one in left environmental circles, but it is important to take it beyond this generality. If capitalism in general terms is a system with unique potential to cause resource depletion and environmental damage, how the global food system has developed under capitalism is key to the ecological problems it is now causing. To return to the issue of waste, for example, it is evident that food waste is not just an unfortunate side effect, but an essential part of the supermarket food system. This might seem counterintuitive, and can indeed be portrayed so, since wasted food means on the face of it a wasted opportunity for profit. Indeed, one suggested approach to dealing with food waste is to encourage supermarkets and companies to deal with it to improve their bottom line, with the environmental benefits of waste reduction as a fortunate add-on.378 It is difficult to imagine, however, that supermarkets, suppliers and producers are unaware that food waste costs them money until this is pointed out to them by environmental activists.
The problem is that eliminating waste while preserving profits is not an easy proposition, and it is not the case that the players in the food supply chain have been indifferent to waste up until now. On the contrary, supermarkets can be seen to be extremely concerned to reduce their waste and therefore their costs, but they are doing so not by giving unsold food away at the end of the day, but by using their power to insist to their suppliers that they will not confirm the amount of product they want until just before delivery. Suppliers with sufficient power will then try to pass this on by implementing similar ‘just in time’ policies with their own suppliers, and so on until the least powerful parts of the supply chain get stuck with food that can’t be used.
What this highlights is that it isn’t waste per se which costs the individual companies which are part of the food supply chain, but waste which they can’t pass on. In their position as the most powerful companies, the supermarkets can benefit from the short lead times and speedy deliveries which would be lengthened if waste were cut across the entire chain, but they reduce the waste for which they have to pay by forcing their suppliers to bear the cost of it themselves. It would be difficult to argue that reducing waste in this scenario would increase the profits of supermarkets: within a market system, their behaviour is perfectly sensible and the levers to persuade them to change their practices are unclear. Similarly, it is not surprising that supermarkets are resistant to allowing their surplus food to be distributed for free: they run the risk of losing either customers who could pay for it, but chose to wait until it is deemed ‘wasted’, or the exclusive image of high-end products if they are given out at the end of their sell-by dates to those who wouldn’t otherwise be able to pay for the privilege.
The waste caused by the supermarket system within capitalism is both serious and revealing about the workings of the system as a whole, but it is clearly not the whole problem. As John Bellamy Foster recently pointed out, the suggestion that we need to ‘ecomodernize our shopping habits’ hardly covers the ecological crisis facing us.379 Waste of energy and food is not simply the preserve of supermarkets, nor indeed of consumers themselves, but is built into the entire food system. This might seem an unexceptional statement, but the point, as with supermarket waste, is that this is not waste which happens because chief executives have not yet seen that reducing waste is in the interests of their bottom line, but waste which is such an integral part of production that it is responsible itself for a large measure of profitability.
Processed foods: an example
The development of processed foods is a useful example. As we have seen, for many, the degree of processing to which food has been subjected is now viewed as less important for its impact on the planet than its intrinsic nature. Processing food is often lumped together with the effects of transporting it as things which we used to be concerned about, but have now learnt are not as serious as meat-eating. However, to point out that meat production accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions than processing food is not the same as to say that the energy used in food-processing is negligible. In any case, the diet of the poor, fat people in the frame for climate change is usually characterised as containing large numbers of processed foods, and eating fewer of them generally appears as a step towards a more ecologically-conscious, as well as healthier, diet.
This view of processed foods casts eating them as a personal choice; a moral failing or a decision dictated by circumstances like lack of time or cooking facilities, depending on how condemnatory is the position of the viewer. What it precludes is an understanding that the spread of processed foods is neither the result of indolence, decline of cookery teaching in schools nor any other personal changes, but of the fact that our food system is capitalist. Processed foods are nothing more than the attempts of food companies to maintain and increase their profits in the face of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. It is for this reason that they exist and that Western diets have become increasingly likely to include them.
The conventional narrative of the development of processed foods has it as a consumer-led revolution. As one account summarises it, after the end of the Second World War, ‘manufacturers desperate to unload the newfangled frozen, canned and dried foods they had created for foxhole consumption found a willing population of women who had gone to work during the war, and who were no longer interested in fussing over meals’.380 Ready meals, heat-and-serve foods and the like were bought enthusiastically by women who still had the main responsibility for feeding the family, but who didn’t want to spend hours in the kitchen to do so, or did not have enough confidence in their cooking skills to cook from scratch. This story can be presented in a more or less critical way of the processed food-embracing consumer, depending on whether it’s a nostalgic celebration of weird processed foods or an argument that we are eating ourselves and the planet to death, but the constant is that processed and junk foods were developed because that is what people wanted to eat. It’s a simple tale, with only one unfortunate aspect: that it isn’t true.
It’s clear in fact that food manufacturers in the US after the Second World War had an uphill struggle to persuade women to adopt their products in place of their own home-cooking. It is true that the media in the 1950s proclaimed over and over again that convenience foods were the new foods of choice, but this reflected what food manufacturers wanted to be the case, rather than an actual shift in behaviour. The media stories, with their proclamations of ‘a revolution in eating habits’ or housewives ‘waiting with outstretched arms’ for processed food, were protesting too much.381
Betty Friedan’s discussion in her 1963 The Feminine Mystique of how advertisers tried to sell food and cleaning products to women is interesting here. According to Friedan, advertisers of time-saving gadgets and products didn’t see career women as their primary market, even though you would think that they would be the group who would be most in need of time-saving, as they were too sceptical and picky. The ideal market was the ‘balanced homemaker’, a woman who spent all day at home but who was trying to convince herself that ‘managing a well run household’ was a sufficient use of ‘her own executive ability’. The way to sell processed foods to this group, the manufacturers worked out, was both to prey on their insecurities about the standard of their cooking, and to convince them that processed foods simply removed the drudgery from cooking, while leaving them room to express themselves through the finishing touches.382 As Ernest Dichter of the Institute for Motivational Research put it, in an oft-quoted dialectic (Betty Friedan relied heavily on Dichter for her chapter on advertising, but, coyly, did not name him):
That the food manufacturers were able to overcome consumer resistance is a demonstration of how little the shape of our diets is determined by consumer choice, unmediated by corporate interests, just as, for example, the shift in US diets from pork to beef in the same period was dictated by grain and beef producers.384 The question, however, is why it was worth food companies’ while to convince consumers to embrace processed foods. While canning and freezing were known before the mid-twentieth century, other processing techniques were largely developed to feed the troops in the Second World War, and military food has not usually been so appetising that it has been enthusiastically adopted by civilians. The answer, of course, is that processing equals profit.
The profit for the food manufacturer comes from the value generated by the labour on the food. A farmer pays labourers to harvest a field of potatoes, but he doesn’t pay them the full value of the crop – he pays them as little as he can get away with, which if they’re undocumented, migrant workers, is probably very little indeed – and the difference is the surplus value, the part of the value of the potatoes from which profits can be made. The farmer could sell the potatoes to a retailer to sell from a sack in front of the shop. The retailer would make some profit from the value of the shop workers in selling the potatoes, but as far as late capitalism is concerned, this isn’t a particularly profitable chain. However, if the farmer were to sell the potatoes to a food manufacturer to wash, peel, dry and sell to another manufacturer to put into heat and serve shepherds pie, that would add another two stages for the generation of surplus value, and therefore profit. All of which explains why it’s harder than it used to be to buy potatoes with the earth still on.
The more production steps food goes through, the more surplus value it represents, and so ultimately the more money the capitalist makes from it. So we have what John Bellamy Foster calls ‘ever more baroque’ commodity chains, in which food undergoes another processing step whose sole point is to generate another increment of profit, with the result that, in Foster’s example, a muffin, which could be whipped up in a domestic kitchen in half an hour, goes through seventeen energy steps, accounting for twice as much energy in production as it takes to grow the raw material.385 The expenditure on processing is utterly out of proportion to the value of the initial ingredients, but that does not matter. Capitalism, whatever we’re told by its defenders, does not have to be rational. It only has to be profitable.
The energy used to process that muffin is not used because humans are naturally profligate and lazy, but because it is actively more profitable under capitalism for the muffin to go through seventeen energy steps than seven. Although the tendency in much recent writing about food and energy use has been to minimise the energy from processing compared to the energy inherent in the food itself, this is deceptive, as it underestimates the extent to which the need to add processing steps to add profits has shaped the entire food system. It is hardly surprising that a system in which energy use is rewarded by profits and simple production chains are effectively penalised appears to be structured around as much energy use as possible. It’s because it is.
The consequence is that we can’t conclude that we are transgressing natural limits as a result of the types of food we eat, or the number of people on the planet, when the profligacy of capitalist food production is its dominant characteristic. It’s not so much that the current food production system is wasteful, it’s that the wastefulness is the point. If we want to know if seven billion, or indeed nine billion, people can live on the planet without destroying it, or if we are up against a fundamental natural limit which no system could stay within, we need to consider if we could do so with a less wasteful system than capitalism. It is capitalism and not basic human profligacy which makes current food production so destructive, but could we really all have a decent standard of living without that destructive capitalist production? It is to a consideration of the alternatives, and of how we might get there, that we now turn.