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Chris Saliba is one of Webdiary’s active citizen journalists, having contributed numerous articles and book reviews over past years. His Webdiary archive is here, and he also has his own website 

Is our food too cheap?

By Chris Saliba

Not so long ago I was sitting out the front of the Vic Market food court when I saw a healthy-looking young man hovering over one of the bins. I presumed he must be one of the cleaners, until I noticed he was lifting half eaten foodstuffs out of the bin and assembling them neatly on a paper napkin.

It was one of those surreal moments where you can’t believe your eyes. I gulped. Was he going to eat this stuff?

Gingerly folding up his napkin, the young man took his place amongst the lunch time crowd.

It was a moment of unspoken embarrassment where we regular eaters tried to keep up appearances, while secretly reeling in horror.

After having digested the original shock, however, I don’t know if it was more disturbing that someone would so brazenly eat out of a bin, or the fact that so much edible food was being thrown out.

Intrigued, I kept my eye on that bin, and was amazed to see an endless stream of food dumped as a matter of course.

Why do we throw out so much food? According to environmental group Planet Ark, we buy and then bin around 3 million tonnes of food a year. That’s just the food we personally throw out.

The National Farmers Federation says that up to $700 million worth of produce has been left to rot due to labour shortages. The $17 per hour that the industry pays to pick fruit is clearly not thought worth the effort. No wonder that hospitality wages are falling, while mining wages have surged to around $50 per hour, or $100,000 per year. Coal may be a greater energy source than apples and oranges, but we still have to eat.

I could console myself with my own frugality and distaste for wasting food, but I’d be deluding myself. I’m guilty of demanding that bananas be transported from the North all year round, and see fit to buy tinned tomatoes flown in from Italy. These items should be more properly described as petro-foods.

It’s been estimated that the average Australian basket of food travels around 70,000 miles. That doesn’t include the energy costs in the actual food’s production – from manufacturing to the use of pesticides and fertilizers. For example, it takes 2,200 calories of hydrocarbon energy to produce a can of soft drink containing 200 calories. No wonder we need to extract so much energy out of the ground. How would we feed ourselves otherwise?

While it would be interesting to add ‘food miles’ to our information labelling, imagine if we could see other hidden costs itemised.

Consider chocolate and the child labour used to harvest cocoa beans on African plantations. World Vision CEO Tim Costello says it would cost the Australian chocolate industry approximately $12 million per year to clean up the supply chain, or around 1 percent added to every chocolate bar.

Or think how much we pay in food advertising, $259 million last financial year. So divorced have we become from the plants and animals that make up our diet, that we need cartoon characters and advertising jingles to persuade us to eat.

In the British series, Eataholics, adult Brits with eating disorders recoil in horror at the sight of fresh vegetables, calling them ‘filthy’ and ‘disgusting’. Some gag when trying to eat tiny slices of fruit that you’d usually prepare for a small child. No wonder: our tastebuds have been corrupted over the years by foods adulterated with artificial flavours concocted in chemistry labs. Real food comes as a shock.

When you take this strange attitude to nature, and add it to a demand for cheap food, perhaps it’s inevitable that you get something like Mad-Cow Disease. Feeding offal (unusable parts of dead animals) to cows seemed a good cost cutting measure to the British beef industry. Never mind that cows are designed to eat grass. This cost saving measure resulted in more than four million cattle being destroyed, estimated costs of $7 billion and transmission to at least 18 countries. It begs the question, can we afford cheap food if the results are so dire?

Oscar Wilde famously described a cynic as someone who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Our market obsessed economy only looks at prices, demanding that they be kept as low as possible, while skewering how we value food.

You could even argue that the capitalist model for food, with its goal of ever expanding consumption, is at odds with the human health requirements of moderation and restraint.

Too much we take food for granted, have little to no knowledge of its provenance, and presume that it will keep growing on supermarket shelves forever. Hidden costs, called 'externalities' in business jargon, don't get a look in. Such veiled costs are really price distortions.

I’ve seen that urban forager on several other occasions picking up a free lunch. I wouldn’t recommend bin foraging, but that young chap looks fit enough. Most people would probably surmise he’s somehow unhinged, but I think there may be a considerable amount of method in the madness.