How food waste became the climate crisis no one wants to stop

One winter morning, a headteacher texted me at dawn: “We have no milk. No cereal. Nothing for the breakfast club.” At that very moment, my team was unloading supermarket pallets piled with perfectly good yoghurt, bread and fruit that had been rescued only hours from destruction. We transported it to the school and, by 8am, 200 children had eaten.

That is the moral contradiction of our age: children in Britain starting school hungry while edible food is destroyed at scale because our systems make waste cheaper than compassion. The mass wastage of food in a country where hunger is rising is Britain’s quietest scandal. It is also one of the most overlooked drivers of the climate crisis.

Recent figures from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) highlight the scale of Britain’s food waste crisis. An estimated 10.7 million tonnes of food valued at around £17bn is discarded each year across farms, factories, shops, restaurants and homes. Break that down and it works out at roughly £1,000 of wasted food for an average family of four.

Households are responsible for around 60 per cent of the total, while farms contribute nearly a sixth. Shockingly, almost half of what is thrown away is still perfectly edible, representing millions of lost meals every day. Beyond the financial and social impact, the environmental cost is profound, with wasted food producing around 18 million tonnes of greenhouse gases annually, undermining both the UK’s climate commitments and its food security.

The real cost is to the planet, at a time when we’re hosting global climate talks and pledging net zero. If we are serious about food security and climate leadership, tackling food waste must be treated as a national priority. And yet, when governments file their climate plans under the Paris Agreement, fewer than 15 per cent even mention food waste. It is a blind spot that borders on negligence.

My team and I have spent 12 years intercepting surplus food and redistributing it to schools, shelters and community hubs with the aim of “zero waste and zero hunger”. In that time, we have saved thousands of tonnes of food from landfill and served millions of meals – but this has been achieved against the odds.

What I have seen is not just inefficiency but a system that actively incentivises destruction. Farmers are locked into contracts where it is cheaper to plough crops back into the soil than to harvest and distribute them. Supermarkets continue to impose cosmetic standards that see edible produce rejected. Defra, the very department tasked with protecting our food system, commissions endless reviews and pilots, and fails to legislate. Meanwhile, the consultancy industry profits handsomely from producing reports and frameworks about food waste, while redistribution hubs such as mine survive on volunteers and near-zero core funding.

This is not uniquely British. In the United States, confusing date-labelling laws result in millions of tonnes of food being discarded. By contrast, in 2016, France introduced the Garot law, which made it illegal for supermarkets to destroy or make edible food unusable, and instead made them donate surplus food to charities. One of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals commits the world to halving food waste by 2030, but we are off track. Every year of delay is a year of squandered emissions cuts.

The scandal is not that waste exists; it is that we designed systems that make waste rational. Retail procurement contracts that penalise oversupply but not disposal. Liability regimes that make donation a risk but landfill safe. Subsidies that reward energy-from-waste plants for burning surplus instead of redistributing it. And a government that prefers to outsource “solutions” to consultants rather than fund the vans, fridges and workers that can fix the problem tomorrow.

This is Britain’s quiet hypocrisy. The Food Standards Agency enforces strict traceability on every sandwich sold, but when that same sandwich becomes surplus, no system ensures that it reaches a hungry child instead of a bin. If food waste is a symptom of broken systems, then education must be part of the cure. That is why we are paving the way for a forward-looking model of learning where sustainability is not a module at the margins but the principle that underpins everything.

Food waste is not a side issue. It is the billion-meal scandal at the heart of climate breakdown and social injustice. Halving it would deliver emissions savings larger than grounding every plane in the world. It would feed people tonight and safeguard the planet tomorrow.

If leaders want Cop30 to be remembered for more than words, they must confront this scandal – not with pilots and pledges, but with investment and courage.

In a century defined by scarcity, waste is not just careless: it is indefensible.

Taz Khan MBE is the founder of London’s Community Kitchen