If you’re at home, look at your trash can, and think about what you’ve put there this week: at least the equivalent of a meal. It’s an average. Food waste is 10 million tonnes of food thrown away each year in France. We talk about it with the sociologist Jean Viard, director of research at the CNRS, the National Center for Scientific Research. This problem of waste has been taken into account, particularly in France, for about ten years.
franceinfo: We have made laws to limit waste, what does this awareness correspond to?
Basically, we could say that we are leaving the consumer society. Me, small, in the 50s, I was yelled at if I didn’t turn off the light when I left a room. At the time, we were extremely careful. Afterwards, we were carried away by a consumer society.
In addition, in France, on the one hand, we have electricity which is inexpensive, even if it is changing and on the other hand, with the agricultural revolution, chemistry, industry, and then the great agricultural reforms of De Gaulle, essentially of Pisani, effectively from 1962, the date of Algerian independence, we no longer had this feeling of food shortage felt during the war and after the war, we had provided food. France was independent when it came to food, so there weren’t really any limits and families’ food budgets plummeted. The share of income spent on food has dropped significantly.
So, it’s a whole period that we are emerging from, because the consumer society is no longer our cultural and mental referent, we are in a society of reuse. The clothing economy has completely collapsed because people buy second-hand stuff, they are very proud that it is second-hand, whereas before, very modest people often bought second-hand and tried not to say it. Today, on the contrary, it becomes a fashionable elegance. It’s the same with food.
We are entering a new society: we were in industrial societies, we valued progress, and we had the impression that the scale was endless. At one point, we realized that we had made such predations on nature, that we were at the top of the ladder, and we began to think about how we manage to live in a society where nature has taken over, where man is no longer master and possessor of nature?
And nature, it gives us global warming, fires, irrigation problems and therefore we have a problem of food limitation. It is a new morality and in this new morality obviously comes the selective sorting of waste which means that we attach importance to this waste. And now, we separate the glass, the batteries, the food, and we realize that we throw away a lot of things that shouldn’t necessarily be thrown away. Basically, it’s a new system of values that will help us win the climate battle. We measure there a thermometer of the evolution of mentalities which go in the right direction.
But wasting less also means producing better. Maybe today, we’re all looking for our connection with nature, telling ourselves that we might be able to create a little corner of a vegetable garden in our garden, on our balcony, to waste less too, because are we going to better control our consumption?
Remember that 60 to 70% of people have a garden, 40% of which do some vegetable gardening in it. We are a society of individual houses with a garden: people want to grow a tree, to have an animal, 80% of gardens have an animal, it’s the way of life. But what has changed is that before we wanted green spaces in the cities, today we want nature that marks the seasons, we want to see fruit trees on the roundabouts with the fruits that fall, we let the grass grow, in winter it is yellow. What we want is to see life at work in nature because it is a way of knowing how to live in the world which is getting warmer.
And we also want to limit waste. And to fight against waste, there are also charities that tour stores every day to collect unsold items. Winter is approaching and the needs are increasing. So we also think of these volunteers who give their time and who need our donations.