6. Waste

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When it comes to food, what we waste, and why we waste it, is a direct product of our attitudes: the degree to which we understand or value what we eat. It’s part of our gastronomic culture – and the fact that British households throw away a third of the food they buy tells you everything you need to know about ours.

Our industrial past in Britain has disconnected us with food, and despite the recent so-called ‘foodie revolution’, the majority of us neither understand food nor care about it much. We waste 10 billion pound’s worth of food every year because we don’t see food for what it is: the most important thing in our lives. But food waste is not limited to what we throw away – the entire modern food system is predicated on it, from the way we produce food, transport it, store it, cook it and eat it. At the scale of the city, our attitudes towards food determine how well we fit into a natural organic cycle – as we must all ultimately do to survive.

In the pre-industrial world, cities recycled almost all their waste. Since most of it was the direct product of the food system anyway, that was much easier to do. Today it’s much harder for us to sort out our waste. Industrialisation has made it a far more complex problem, and post-industrial cities have generally evolved into one-way consuming machines. However some cities, such as Vienna, where 60 per cent of household waste is recycled, have shown what can be done. Waste, after all, is just a matter of attitude.