Today, Thursday the Eighth of May 2008, the Independent front page carried this article. Apparently the UK throws away 6.7 million tonnes of food a year. This is of course shocking because there are people starving in hot countries.

I'm sorry, but did my mum write that article?

Okay, I do get that actually disposing of waste is a problem, I do get that actually dumping biodegradable waste on landfill sites is stupid, but did they have to play the "there are starving people" card (it's made more strongly in the printed newspaper, the online version is abridged).

I get that it seems unfair, I get that we all feel guilty about living in a wealthy democracy that isn't presently involved in a civil war instead of an equatorial dictatorship, but for fuck's sake, how are these two facts supposed to be causally related? How is solving one supposed to solve the other? Are we going to bag up the however many million Tescos sausages we throw away a year and post them to Madagascar? Are we going to donate the four hundred pounds per year the average family will allegedly save to Oxfam?

Then of course there are the solutions they actually propose to this problem. They suggest that supermarkets should stop offering "buy one get one free" deals, which encourage people to buy more than they need, and that people should rediscover "such apparently forgotten household management techniques as reusing leftovers and pre-shop planning."

Now perhaps I'm oversimplifying here, but don't buy-one-get-one-free offers tend to be used in order to clear surplus stock which is going to be thrown away anyway? And doesn't it provide a useful way for people on low incomes afford to actually - y'know - eat (the Indy also suggests we tax food for its carbon footprint, so that those horrid people on the housing estate have to pay as much for their Tescos basics squash as we nice people pay for our organic fairtrade orange juice). As for those household management techniques, yes, probably people could plan their shopping better. Perhaps we could have some kind of situation where there was a person in every family whose job it was to do all of the shopping, cooking, cleaning and other domestic tasks. Perhaps that person could be expected not to have a career or a life outside the home, thereby making sure that they have plenty of time to plan their shopping and come up with exciting, creative ways to prepare leftovers. Perhaps we could call those people "women".

The whole thing stinks of the worse kind of middle class hand-wringing, harping on about how awful it is that while there are people starving in the world there are horrid, wasteful people who throw away food, while we sit back safe in the knowledge that we have the time and money to live on M&S ready meals that we buy every day as we walk home from our well paid jobs. Meanwhile there are a whole lot of people who buy cheap food in bulk because that's the only way to feed their kids, who don't plan their weekly shopping because they're already working way too many hours for way too little money, who don't care about waste because they're too busy worrying about the rent.

The environmental issues surrounding domestic waste are very real, and the problems of disposing of 6.7 million tonnes of food waste need to be addressed. Perhaps, for example, we could develop a more efficient waste management system. Perhaps we could import less. Of course this would then have complex knock-on effects for the economy, for people employed in the waste disposal and road haulage industries, as well as for those countries from whom we import the vast amounts of food we throw away every year. We are, according to the Indy, currently paying eight billion pounds a year for food we do not eat. If we stopped doing that we would, functionally, be removing eight billion pounds a year from the economy. Those eight billion pounds presumably pay the salaries of around half a million people who work in supermarkets, not to mention the road hauliers, bin men and Independent journalists who then get paid for dealing with the rubbish afterwards.

Dealing with the environmental impacts of the day-to-day operation of our economy is a big, complex, really really difficult job. The Indy seems to think we should tax food according to its carbon footprint, which is essentially the same as fining people for not living in the home counties ("What do you mean you don't have a farmer's market? Well you should have thought of that before you started being common now shouldn't you"). The reason we import vast amounts of food by road and air is because it's cheap and a lot of people actually have difficulty affording food. Does the Indy really think that people choose to live on Tescos basics because they're too cheap to buy organic?

Either way, none of this has anything at all to do with putting an end to famine in Africa. Indeed I might even suggest that if we want to end world hunger we should all be wasting a lot more. Do your bit to end famine today! Throw away a fairtrade chocolate bar.