The issue du jour, it seems, is food waste. How ridiculous that households are encouraged not to let a scrap go to waste, when many big corporations are throwing out tonnes of perfectly good food every day and many even going so far as to lock their bins.
It's the same irony that sees some of us riding bicycles to save petrol when companies are opening new airlines and oil drills; that discourages us from taking long showers or leaving the tap on while we brush our teeth when households use only a fraction of the water used for animal agriculture. (Here and here.)
France is a step ahead, as I've written about earlier (the clever ugly produce marketing) and as this recent article investigates. 'French supermarkets will be banned from throwing away or destroying unsold food and must instead donate it to charities or for animal feed, under a law set to crack down on food waste.' Here's hoping that New Zealand follows suit and introduces similar policies. This article lists some companies' policies on food waste… shame it doesn't mention the bakery where I used to work, which sold on half its leftovers to pig farms, and put the other half into locked skips, filmed on camera so that they could be sure no one was getting their products for free. Name em and shame em, I say. Pandoro Bakery, sort your shit out!
When I was living in France in 2013 not a single scrap of food from our household would go to waste. Even if there were just two bites of a salad or stew left, they would go in a container in the fridge - never the bin - and someone would make sure to eat them the next day. The last resort was the compost bin, and the compost went into the prolific vegetable garden. This philosophy has become second nature for me and I'm still horrified when I see friends and family here in NZ tipping uneaten leftovers into the bin - that would have gotten me scolded by my French host family. Then I remember the restaurants, cafes and supermarkets that are doing this on a much larger scale on a daily basis.
I'm not sure what this has to do with my art. Still working that one out. Something analogous, food = materiality, personal responsibility being dwarfed by corporate interests, like the one little artist's eco-friendly art practice up against the multitudes of massive companies using toxic chemicals by the tonne. I don't know. Yet.
