 The topic for this evening is who's responsibility is food waste. We're going to hear from a couple of speakers this evening. B's going to be Brown from Cambridge Stainable Food is going to demonstrate and talk to us a little bit about the tools that we developed for our zero carbon campaign food for our future, which is all about encouraging individuals and households to reduce their food waste. And then we've got Brian Mills from Southcams District Council and he's going to talk to us about the role of the policymaker. That'll be followed by some breakout groups where you'll get the opportunity to get to grips with a couple of thorny questions we've posed for you this evening. So time is quite tight, we only have an hour so we're going to be a bit of a gallop through. So if you could keep your microphones off and if you have any questions we'll try and pick them up at the end of the session. So you can pop them in the chat or if you have any information or comments you just want to let people know pop them in the chat as well. We are going to record the session so if you don't want to be recorded please turn your video off and if you right click on your image you will be able to change your name or rename yourself so you can just take your name out. We're not going to be using the video for anything other than writing a blog post and capturing what people have said. Okay so let's get started. I work for Cambridge Sustainable Food. Cambridge Sustainable Food is a community interest company. We have been in existence for the past five years and we sit underneath a national umbrella called Sustainable Food Places which is run by Sustain and the Soil Association. We're a network of cities. We were one of the earliest signed up. We have generally worked within the within Cambridge City itself but have been doing more and more work out in the county and finding council partners including to have cams to work alongside. We have a bronze level award and our galloping tours are silver this year hopefully and then on to gold and to give you an idea it's a pretty tough system to get through and there's only two cities in the UK with a gold award and as you probably would expect or know that would be Brighton and Bristol. The next slide just gives I'm not going to go into this in any detail but it just gives you I think the scope of the work that we and the ambition that we have here in our work which is the whole food system so everything and most recently of the past year we've been working a lot with the food poverty realm. Obviously there's been given the pandemic there's been a lot of people that have needed assistance over the past year but we're also exceptionally committed to tackling the climate and nature emergencies and this is where the food waste issue sits with us. We work with businesses, we work with local communities, we work with local authorities, we work with policy, we'll work with anybody we can and who will work with us to promote sustainable food. So most recently we've been running the zero carbon communities campaign and that is very much in two parts. Part two is to come later on this year but part one was about reducing food waste with residents. Now obviously we've had to take the Food for Future campaign online which has which people take us through some of those tools. It's been it's been a learning experience to take everything online as I'm sure everybody will appreciate and it's had to do themselves over the past year. Previous campaigns that we have run have included campaigns to do with love food, hate waste, the same to be waste less to save more campaign a couple of years ago obviously zero carbon communities and some of the activities that we've undertaken with that has been things such as we did a pump stunt where we filled a monthly sorry an annual household waste into a punt and yes had a lots of media attention around there. We run the pumpkin festival in Cambridge which attracts over 3,000 visitors and that's very much inviting that the whole community to get to get involved. It usually happens around October and as you know that lots of pumpkin goes to waste around that time so lots of children's activities, fringe activities and a sort of a showcase piece of a farmer's market. We've done ready steady cook surplus food with some local celebrity chefs which was some of the most fun I've ever had and we've also run the taste not waste campaign with local businesses and it was a campaign to help businesses measure their food waste through using a method that are talking developed by RAP so we also alongside that were encouraging businesses to start recycling their food waste and to adopt food waste policies as best practice and some of the successes out of those that campaign the Selwyn College reduced their pace plate waste by 12 percent. Cambridge Cookery School became the first city's zero food waste cafe and at Smokeworks they measured their food waste and the food that came off people's plates that was wasted and they discovered that 64 percent of the food that was put on that plate was going into the bin so as a result they changed they did some behaviour change and they changed where in which they operated doing things like different portion sizes for one, optionals for the things like spores or side dishes so that people could you know build their own plate as it were rather than being given a whole big plate of food and the tickle arms who started composting in their restaurant gardens to feed their vegetable patches which in turn feeds their restaurant. Food waste policies were adopted by six businesses came to Cookery School, H cafe, Selwyn College, Sydney Sussex and Movi. So no strangers to food waste and for me there's some common themes that or some common issues that that sort of that seem to jump out at me or transcend across all of these sort of projects that we've run in the past including this latest one which is zero carbon communities and it's you know you can see them here on the right and it's not rocket science but some of the issues are about how do you engage people how how do you engage people and then how do you really how do you really measure how people have changed their habits. People find it difficult to invest their time and sometimes their money into making those changes that are really needed. Some of the successes the media seems to love food waste and I think that's a fantastic opportunity is to get it into the media and press as much as possible but people tell us on an individual case by case basis that actually they have changed and and what the the stuff the stuff that they've engaged with his has had a meaning for them. Community fridges seem to be a flavour of the year and there's a great national network of fridges run by Hubbub and for those of you don't know community fridges are about using surplus or gathering surplus food from businesses and from individual households putting them in a fridge and then allowing anybody who wants to take that food out of those fridges and use it. For us businesses seem to have the deeper engagement rather than individuals and anything that we have run and have made some of the the biggest changes and that I think is is for a few reasons. One of them obviously is that they can see the the benefit in terms of money returned and savings plus it is it is great great publicity and one of the other great successes that's come out of the past year is the network that has been set up in Cambridge around surplus food distribution. We are we administrate a WhatsApp group WhatsApp seems to be the way in which people organise these days but the WhatsApp group of about 40 organisations and agencies who are sharing any surplus food that they might have around and in amongst themselves. So that's sort of the background as it as it were to to our work and what we do. So the question and it's it's a bit of a false dichotomy but it's it's a starting point I guess and in a way it's the feeds into narratives around what food waste is and whose responsibility is it. We hear a lot about individual responsibility for food waste and looking at these figures we can see that actually the the amount of food waste that comes out of households in the UK surpasses the the food waste by industry. What we do know though is a third of all greenhouse gas emissions come from the food industry which is staggering. And so that so but we know knowing that the households outstrip in terms of wastage more than industry knowing and knowing exactly what's going on though within those households and what the barriers are to behaviour change is really elusive it can be really elusive it can be really difficult to really understand what influences people's behaviour over a long period it's fine to engage people through a campaign or a challenge for a week or two but you know how do we know that that that's really hit the mark five years later a year later 10 years later. I don't know if any of you are in public health but if I talk to any public health colleagues about their behaviour change they'll tell you that behaviour change happens very slowly it happens over generations 10s of years and not just you know within days or weeks. So the work that we do now is difficult to measure and yet who knows what the collective impact is of all the different different campaigns and awareness raising initiatives that we do now will have down the line. Something I noticed that came out this week so recently the Independent ran an article that highlights that one French supermarket outforms a whole sector in the UK so this is sort of looking at it from the other angle not just about individuals but so data obtained from car four I hope hopefully as most people have heard of car four. It's the second largest supermarket in France shows that in 2020 they've donated nearly 31 tons of food from their French supermarkets and that exceeded all the donations from UK supermarkets by about 6 000 tonnes and that's mainly a due to legislation and policy introduced in France in 2016 and that offers tax breaks incentives and legislation to discourage the dumpling of edible food and I think that's a distinction that's worth drawing out when we talk about food waste some of it's edible some of it isn't and really what we do with both of those sort of two categories is key I think so in the UK the UK I mean and Brian hopefully you're going to cover this a bit more and correct me if I'm wrong I am no expert in this field but the UK government does very little to interviewing in the donation of surplus food so that food that is edible and the lack of legislation and policy I was quite shocked to hear it's been highlighted during the pandemic so the government subsidised the purchasing of 10.5 million pounds worth of food through the charity fair share when we could have you know if legislation had been different in terms of donating surplus food we might have been in a better prepared situation and that food going into landfill as rather than the 10.5 million pounds being spent on new food so I think I'm going to wrap up we can't solve the climate emergency I don't feel without a real overhaul of the whole of the food supply chain and that means impacting behaviour change legislation land use and yes 30 percent of agricultural land that is grown on the food is you might well be in that food because that's what happens to it so that's the amount that doesn't get eaten so 30% of the agricultural land that we grow crops on globally. Anyway thanks if you have any questions or comments or information then please drop them in the chat and we'll see what time we have left at the end. I'm going to introduce you to be now who developed the online campaign tools for the zero carbon communities food for our future campaign as I've mentioned we weren't able to run this campaign face-to-face with people we would love to and a lot of our work is often around running stalls and festivals and cook alongs and community meals and all those sort of really fun things that we're all itching to get out and do again but she's made a great great job and I'd like to thank her right there for taking on such a huge challenge of actually pivoting so fast from delivering face-to-face to delivering online yeah it certainly was a huge challenge so thanks Dee. Thank you Sam thanks and as Sam mentioned we ran the campaign to support local communities in South Cams reducing their carbon footprint and this part of the campaign tackled reducing the food that they waste so over four weeks in November we asked people to sign up to an online challenge and we used our website pages to offer different tips and recipes and we emailed the participants every week encouraging them to try a different food habit of food waste reducing habit each week so including things like using the freezer more and using a shopping list when going out shopping so simple tools like that and each week we suggested a new habit thank you Sam next so for our launch event we hosted an online screening of the film just eat it food waste story by Canadian filmmakers Grant Baldwin and Jen Rustmaier and it's a really great film it's won lots of awards we were really delighted to share it with the guests at the launch and we followed the film with the discussion around sustainability with local speakers including Brian thank you Brian back again tonight and the guests really enjoyed the evening we had some really good feedback people found it quite thought provoking and informative and even though the film's a few years old I think the message is still very much is unchanged next so we also hosted some live cookalongs using Zoom which was great because it allowed people to kind of have a real sense of socializing together enjoying cooking together and talking about food waste and recipes even though we couldn't be together it kind of felt like a social event which was great just before Halloween we had a cookalong for families using pumpkin so something like 12 million pumpkins get wasted every Halloween so James Shepherd from the Let's Cook project did a fabulous cookalong using lots of pumpkins so we did some smoky baked beans with grated pumpkin inside and also some pumpkin muffins which were great and then Rosie Sykes who's another local food writer and local chef she also used lots of pumpkin but she also made bread and butter pudding which was really popular and we waste something like 20 million slices every day so it was a fantastic recipe for using upstale bread and she also made some pumpkin and split pea bulgur wheat which was really delicious and finally we had another cookalong which we asked participants of the challenge to send in a shelfie which is something that rap started the idea of taking a photograph of your fridge before you go shopping but we asked people to send what was lurking in their fridge drawer and the chefs Lucy Robinson and Hilary Caccio came up with some great recipe ideas including using up leftover cauliflower leaves which was fantastic next thank you Sam so we felt it was important to include children in the Food for our Future campaign we know that children can have a positive impact on their parents behaviour so we went out to the Histon allotment and we recorded two environmental stories there so compost stew and Don't Waste Your Food which are two really great books for kids so we read them aloud we recorded them and we met a couple of the creatures of the compost down there so Woody the Woodlouse and Cedric the Centipede made an appearance and we were also kindly given an interview by John Kay who's a sort of guru compost guru from the allotment and he gave us an interview on all things compost so all of these videos are available on our YouTube channel which I will put a link to in the chat and I think we have one more slide Sam yeah so we also had during each week of the challenge we shared a new cookery demo from one of our local chefs who generously supported the campaign with their time and their recipes so we asked them to each pick a sort of commonly wasted item so James again bread featured but he made using stale breadcrumbs made what's known in Italy as poor man's parmesan so panguatato which is a really great way to use up stale bread Leo from Jack Gelato chose to share a recipe for a lockdown favorite it's become a lockdown favorite banana bread so he made some muffins which is a great recipe again and they're all available online so I will share a link to those in the chat thank you Sam thank you Bee fantastic please yes please do use those resources and if you want links or you want more information or if you want to embed them in in your own website to just give us a shout um so I'd like to bring us on to looking at the role of the the policymaker um thanks Brian for for being with us um councillor Brian Mills was elected to South Cams district council in May 2018 um becoming part of the new Likdem group that formed the new administration um he's been a major contributor to the formation and enactment of new council policies including green to the core um and last year became cabinet member taking responsibility for environmental services and licensing Brian welcome um Brian's going to try and in 10 minutes um investigate the barriers facing policymakers um and how we overcome those barriers and how can we make wasting food as acceptable as something like least ring or non recycling take it away Brian thank you so would you like to um close my slide down because I'm sort of wanting to wave my arms around in a Magnus pike sort of way and and across along a visual aid absolutely there we go thank you I'll come back to those in a moment so yeah unusually I was explaining to uh Sam and be earlier I don't really think of myself as a politician yet I only joined a political party in 2015 and rather accidentally stood for election and got elected three years or so ago so um but it is interesting that I'm now effectively one of the policymakers that um you've been asking about and so let's let's talk about legislation because be um I'm sorry no Sam mentioned legislation I've got a rather old and tatty doc documents here which is the government's um white paper on waste resources and their strategy for England unfortunately it's been delayed by six months but within there there's a lot of good talk and I'm not going to uncover his face but Michael Gove is in there so I'll leave him covered up but actually he came up with some very good suggestions or at least his team did and there's a lot of reference for example to circular economy which is a phrase that is still new to many in the in the population and and this is a critical part I believe of raising the awareness of all of these issues um I don't think until fairly recently I was aware that a third of the food that we produce in the world goes to waste it doesn't get consumed this is an astonishing figure that actually we're producing 50 percent more food than we consume so you know the awareness of that this is why the value of these um we're on food waste action week this week but that is good it's good news that we're raising awareness and actually feeding back into policy doing it evidence-based wise we've heard a lot of figures tonight about how much waste we're producing you know 15 to 25 percent of our shopping our food shopping is wasted that's an awful lot of money that we're spending on not consuming stuff so you know if if we add that to the 20 percent of the food that's left behind in the field does anybody has anybody been gleaming I've done it a couple of times it's great fun and it's like for free this is this is great news and and the farmers leave it behind we we have a few locally I did go online to see there's a gleaning organization and the nearest ones I could find are locally were Peterborough and Chelmsford so if you're particularly interested I'm I'm sure they would love volunteers locally to organize gleaming clubs and what a great idea what a great idea for the kids take them out into the fields and get free food I think that's a lovely idea so this is all about the awareness of the problem and how how we might fix it the the fact that this food waste I think Sam already mentioned is is a major contribution to greenhouse gases so it's a directly field feeding into the climate change we're suffering from I was at a meeting earlier this week which was reviewing the the flood situation that we had locally in Cambridge in December and January in fact you may remember Storm Bella but she didn't deposit as much as she threatened to locally and yet we still had the third worst flooding on record or the amount third highest amount of rainfall fortunately was over a longer period and didn't cause the devastation that it could but some places were badly affected so more and more people are becoming aware of the direct consequences of climate change I'm talking about water this is where the potatoes are going to make it I don't know um does anybody know how many cubic meters of water go into a tonne of potatoes it's a huge amount and we grow quite a lot of potatoes here so they've got a but they've got a so 22 cubic meters per tonne of potatoes but when I was peeling these potatoes I looked at the thing and thought what's this it's a little less than perfect potatoes these are ugly vegetables but look they're lovely I'm tasting and that's the that's the sort of thing we need to do so good on waitros you know that's they're selling and they say whereas it's helping to reduce food waste so it's part of part of the collaboration between government local government local authorities volunteer groups is to feed into that awareness make it a thing who knew how devastating the plastic in our society was to our oceans and our food chain until David Attenborough came along and told us how bad it was some of those might have known beforehand but that was certainly a big part of bringing into public awareness he would he was firmly willing so he's already done some very good work on food waste you'll have seen seen some of his programs as part of it it's going and shaming the the the supermarkets for the for the waste that they encourage the example of carifor in in in France is remarkable isn't it that that by a combination of willingness and legislation they've produced a massive turnaround of what they do with their food waste so we've got to encourage our supermarkets to do the same while ever there's a lack of legislation to encourage them to do it and then encourage our legislators to make sure that they add their bit to the equation you know so it's combination isn't there's always it's been a tension between persuasion and prohibition and we may need to do like we have with many things like smoking and seatbelt waiting what they're wearing we've had to do a combination of those things and the the waste food that we're producing you know there's a hierarchy of needs for that stuff so the first thing has to feed people then it has to feed animals and then it has to feed energy and then it has to be compost and finally if there's absolutely no alternative to a bit of landfill but that's what we need to make sure people understand is the is the process so i think the the lack of awareness is the key barrier and the improving awareness is the task that we need to take on board and there's there's actually good news in here going back to my bag of very lovely potatoes they were cheaper i save money by buying ugly vegetables so save money while saving the planet it's not a bad little idea is it so that's where i'm coming from i'm more than happy to take any any questions but i've probably done my time in a little bit over so thank you thank you very very much brime um if there are any questions and we can come back to them um towards the end if we we have time so um now it's up to you lot um and i i'm just going to share my screen again to show you the questions that we have um prepared maybe i can drop them in the chat as well see who's still up um okay so here's the tricksy questions i have prepared earlier um if i've been could you try and copy them and put them in the chat i don't know whether whether that will work um yeah that's fine i'll do that okay thank you and then you'll be able to see them as well because i'll i'll move away from the screen in a minute so we have we have two questions here as i said before it is a bit of a false dichotomy to to say is it legislators or is it the individual responsibility but i also think these are these are useful questions to ask um so what barriers do individuals and households face um when reducing food waste um and how can their behaviour change happen so this can be things that you find tricksy at home difficult um but also maybe if you work in this this sector what are what are the real issues at a household level um and of how do we we we get over those barriers uh the second question is what should the role of policymakers and legislators be um what does policy and legislation look like for zero food waste society um how how much intervention is needed and where and how you can we're going to split you into groups um so please feel free to answer one or or both um or to check them out entirely and talk about something uh that that is um that is is of more interest and what i would like to ask though is that there's a um somebody in the group that can feedback um at the end of the session so um maybe feedback two things your your group felt was important or that they'd just like to convey to everybody else and that can be around legislation policy making behaviour change or some something else um that comes out your discussions so can i ask for um one person from each group to to give us a really brief quick um summary um of that your your discussions um who would like to go first don allison thank you you're on mute okay now i'm unmuted um right yes i in our small group um we uh we looked mostly at the the first question which was around um behaviour change and what individuals um what or what barriers individuals and households have and one of the things we focused on um was um children we felt that they weren't perhaps being taught enough um in schools um you know there's there's cookery lessons that that may happen but there's certainly a lot more learning that could uh could be undertaken in schools and from a younger age so rather than perhaps just cooking lessons in senior school what about kids learning about where their food comes from from the age of five six um so that's something we we thought might be important um we also realised that another barrier is actually income um and one thing we touched on was that there's a an eat well plate um that the government posts on their website that looks at what a typical person or child should be eating and how many people can afford to buy such a plate of food um and that the the number of people that could afford that um is actually reducing so that's that's not good income and affordability as it is a big barrier um and of course time and convenience as well with families having lots of conflicting priorities um especially at the moment if you're juggling home and work and maybe you're being self-employed or maybe you're involved with someone else uh maybe both and maybe you're trying to homeschool kids or you have kids unexpected at home you might be at nursery maybe you know just just live with various things and priorities um it can be difficult to find the time to to cook a meal from scratch um so that was something that we we thought about um and one idea that was suggested was perhaps supermarkets could have a vegetable of the week or something or some way of focusing on a particular food that recipes could then be could be suggested from there um but yes there's certainly a lot of um barriers and we could have talked for you okay thank you Alison thank you very very much yeah some great points um okay who would like to go next somebody someone has to hand nominate Emma from our group there we go Emma so long mute unmute I went I'm unmuted now am I wasn't letting me do it hi um okay so you've covered quite a bit on that one actually um I think in addition to that I think we sort of touched on you know back to children and you know children might necessarily eat everything on their plate so there's a lot of you know wastage there and you can't force your children to eat a particular meal um and I don't want to eat leftovers all the time you know dog might not want to or things like that so um freezing is quite a good thing to do if you could you know perhaps think about what you could freeze even the things that you've you've cooked you might have made a meal but even things like bananas and things you can freeze and certain you know fruit that you can actually um freeze itself and it'd be useful to have lists of what you can and what you can't and obviously people can find that but I think it needs to be sort of made simple for people because um you know there's time again you know time is the big thing that we were talking about earlier and time you know not everybody's got time so um what I was going to be talking about I'm just trying to think um we didn't actually sort of touch much on the second sort of question but that was mainly the first question Brian is there anything that I've missed on that one I don't know I was trying to think um I mean I think the only thing I'd add to that was the the planning and helping people um work work out what they they needed to go and buy before they went and bought it because that's that's really where it's in the purchasing of the stuff because it people are buying more than they need uh they then don't necessarily saw it properly I mean we we took most of our uh two weekly shop straight in the freezer as you've just mentioned but it's because there's a plan there and if you don't have a plan how do you know what you're going to do with what when but that's that that's an education process isn't it you know I think Alison talked about um you know getting the getting the kids on board with that early doors you know and understanding that that's really what we need to do otherwise we'll we'll carry on doing the waste I mean my my parents bless them um quite a long time gone now you know grew up in the war where it was it wasn't just an option to use everything on the plate you'd be going hungry if you didn't yeah I know I need to be strict with my children I think you can't have your dessert until you've eaten that but you know after you said it about 50 times you know your patience wears you know then so it's really there is a balance but talking about um children and you're saying about the education of children you know maybe something that the eco schools could sort of you know I'm sure they probably do do stuff on them you know food waste but you know it could be incorporated more and what they do and encouraging more schools to participate in the eco schools as well could be another thing great thank you these are all fantastic ideas I'm writing them thank you thank you Emma thank you Brian um next group I think maybe there's one more group is there Claire hi Claire I'm just going to volunteer because we couldn't volunteer in the breakout group and we didn't specifically um answer the questions but our comments ranged um first of all difficulty barriers to donating surplus food for example um food banks some of them only take tin goods rather than fresh goods potential lack of knowledge about where to donate surplus food lack of connectivity between individuals who have excess that's potentially going to go off quite quickly and on people who can use it um people are not seeing the value of food because they're removed from the process of producing food it's quite easy and can often be too cheap to go to a supermarket and buy packaged food that does has very little value to a family whereas if you produce it yourself and you put the work in to grow the vegetables in your own garden you're not going to let it go to waste very easily because you know what went the work behind it um and lack of knowledge within households of how to use odds and ends um for example um you know how to make your own stock or how those recipes you mentioned sounded really good about how to use up the stale bits of bread or the end slices that a lot of the kids don't want to eat and things like that's lack of knowledge of of how to use up scraps and things that might easily go in the compost bin I think that was um I might have missed and I think certainly I can chip in from our group that if I've missed something thank you so much Claire brilliant thank you does anybody else have anything they want to add Catherine I just wanted to add something Michael said that he is trying to encourage people to reduce their waste and Michael you said something about you um set a challenge and how much carbon mileage you could rack up making a meal and I think that's a really fun way of looking at it because I'm reading a book with my son at the moment that's about carbon and it having to be restricted so he was upset by the concept of producing two to two hours a day and I was like I think that COVID is probably more difficult than that really at the moment but um I think that's a really interesting way of making things fun making a positive experience I think that from my perspective if you make this into an educational and positive experience that you're involved and engaged in what you're eating then people will take to it rather than making it into a like you've got to suffer because it's not really um uh it's it's much more mindful if you turn into a mindfulness exercise it when it's about well-being I think that's um yeah a really positive way forward I think policy obviously needs to kind of counteract that so in for instance the big thing I noticed about moving to South Cambridgeshire is the fact we have a green bin and if you've got a green bin then you're going to think about where the waste goes um and if you open up that question then hopefully if people have the time if they're not overworked and you know overstressed then there is going to be more consideration because the environment really lends itself to that whereas in places like central London it doesn't lend itself to thinking about where waste goes because of the way that everything is structured um yeah so you know those opportunities to use wormaries and to build your own compost pits I think scientifically that's an interesting process but yeah I think I mean personally I'm really into this idea of compost and I think theoretically it's a wonderful idea so it's tapping into that I'll stop there thank you Catherine that's fantastic and yes you're absolutely correct fun and making it a positive experience will always engage people more than finger wagging and telling them they mustn't mustn't do things so yes it's always been mindful of that when we we're talking to others um we are a run out of time does anybody have any sort of very pressing questions that they might like to ask Brian or myself or be um obviously you can get in touch with us um outside of this and um well I'm I'm offering Brian Brian's time but you can contact myself or be at any time um I think these dropped our contact so it goes with the territory that people can contact me if they were if they're not right um so unless there's any sort of burning questions um I think we'll wrap it up there thank you so much for um coming along um great to see you and um I hope to see you or work with some of you um again in the near future thank you all right have a good evening bye