I'll eat as much or as little as I damn well like thankyou!

The Food Nazis are back. Last week we were eating too much. This week we are not eating enough!

A campaign has been launched by yet another tax-payer funded quango. Like all the others, this campaign will no doubt have legs as it starts with the assumption that we're all idiots. What better way to put your message out that to cunt off those to whom you are trying to preach?

The Love Food Hate Waste campaign from WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) has little to say, but obviously lots of our money to say it with.

“At a cost of £8 billion a year, it’s a serious issue that not only impacts the environment but our pockets too”.

The £8bn refers to the cost of wasted food and not the quango in case you're wondering! However, as BOM points out, the quango costs us £80m a year. Not an insignificant sum by any means. In fact this organisation of 200 people costs us 1/100th of the total cost of food waste of 60 million people. Is that good value for money?

The PDF report itself, which the campaign has been launched with, starts with a nice misleading overview:

Each year in the UK we throw away about one third of all the food we buy and at least half of this is food that could have been eaten.

then further on

Food waste is a big problem in the UK. Our estimates suggest that we throw away as much as a third of all the food we buy; and at least half of this is food that could have been eaten, if we had only managed it better. The rest is inedible, for example vegetable peelings, tea bags and meat carcasses. Overall around 6.7 million tonnes of food waste is produced by households – that’s about a fifth of our domestic waste.

So in fact, what they really mean is that we waste only 1/6th of our food; 3.35 million tonnes of food, the other 3.35 million tonnes being inedible waste itself.

Back to the introduction:

At WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) we have committed ourselves to working with retailers, consumers, local authorities, community groups and other stakeholders and partners to reduce consumer food waste by 100,000 tonnes by March 2008.

So they are looking to make a reduction of a mere 1/35th, hardly seems worth it, does it? Ah but it is, I hear our delightful socialist friends saying, it is wealth creation, keeping bums in jobs, saving the planet, helping us re-wire our brains. The usual nonsense. The fact is that when taken in the grand scheme of carbon emissions, this tax funded back-slapping jolly aims to have a net UK carbon reduction of 0.068% of CO2 emmissions - a great sum of absolutely fuck all!

The origins of their calculations are obscure, if not pulled from a hat, with no mention about how they arrived at them in their report, beyond surveys (see Appendix 1 of the PDF "WRAP’s Research Studies" - not one mention of anybody physically getting their hands dirty and rummaging through bin bags and the like!).

Further digging in their FAQ document:

How do you calculate the environmental damage caused by food waste?
We know how many carbon dioxide equivalents (greenhouse gases) are produced in the UK from Government figures, and experts in the UK and Europe suggest that almost 20% of the total comes from producing, transporting, preparing and storing food and drink. We also know that when food is sent to landfill it produces more greenhouse gases as it breaks down. We can calculate how many carbon dioxide equivalents are linked to food, and if we assume that half of the food thrown away could have been eaten (and we think that most could have been) then this is equal to at least 15 million tones of carbon dioxide equivalents. We know how many cars there are on the road, and how many carbon dioxide equivalents the average car produces, and so we can work out that this 15 million tonnes is the same as that produced by 1 in 5 cars in the UK.

So, thus I arrive at the following calculation:

3.35M tonnes of waste produces 15M tonnes of CO2
100,000 tonnes of waste equals 2.985% of food waste

2.985% of 15M tonnes of CO2 equals 447750 tonnes of CO2

UK CO2 emissions equal 658M tonnes (2006 - Source)

447750 tonnes equals 0.068% of CO2 emissions

OK, so we have ascertained that this exercise is a pointless waste of our money for such a negligible aim, but I guess at least this bunch of parasites aren't as foolish as some of the other target hunters in government, with their ridiculous aims to reduce CO2 emissions by tens of percent whilst trying to sustain economic growth. OK, I joke. These people are worse. They are not clouded by idealism, they are clouded by gravy train.

Moving on from these noble aims, the report itself is at best GCSE project dog turd. One of the section titles is "Are We Bothered?", to which the only answer can be No; 'cos if we was bovvered we wutnt fuckin' do it!

Please do read the rest if you can keep your dinner down and not end up wasting that precious food also...

Onto the campaign itself. It is supported by Ainsley "Ready Steady Waste" Harriott. 2 teams, 1 hour, cook it up to bloody nibble on it. Where do these delectable dishes end up I wonder? Acton tip most likely! In any case it is supported by Wavey Hands, which nullifies the whole bloody thing. Having him telling me how to cook is more than enough.

There is a myriad of further holes in this shoddy organisation and their ill conceived dictatorial campaign, but I leave you with their disclaimer:

While steps have been taken to ensure accuracy, WRAP cannot accept responsibility or be held liable to any person for any loss or damage arising out of or in connection with this information being inaccurate, incomplete or misleading.

Good thing they disclaim themselves as I was thinking of suing for loss of temper reading through their imbecilic twaddle.