I’m the gutter gourmet: how I spent a month eating other people's leftovers | Environment | The Guardian

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"We don’t talk enough about the street food scandal – leftovers chucked away without a second thought."

So, after tackling food waste through buying excess food, meals binned by restaurants and items past their sell by date in supermarkets, an article about fast food waste.

It is pretty gross, and I suggest you read the article when you're not just about to or have just eaten: "a few slices of margherita (my favourite, by the way, and so much better garnished with a dusting of cigarette ash)."

The author has been living off discarded fast food every day for a month and his conclusion is, "And what I found in the gutter raises serious questions about the cheapness of our food, the obesogenic environments we all live in, and the widespread denial of our sustainability crisis."

At the risk of demonising a specific group and increasing intergenerational tensions, the author notes that the one characteristic shared by people that dump fast food waste is that they are young. In particular, that they haven't lived through the privations of the 1939-1945 war and its dreary quality of life aftermath.

In the same issue as this article is another one about the health risks of heavily processed foods using industrial ingredients. In the UK, these foods are so popular, they make up more than half the daily diet.

In a much earlier article published in 2011, a survey finds that fast food wrappers top the list of litter dropped on UK streets.

My plogging expeditions over the past year show that trend is continuing, with fast food wrappers and drinks containers followed by drinks cans generally as the top litter I'm collecting. Roads out of the city, as they reach the open countryside, seem especially prone to large, long-standing collections of rubbish.

Climate change doesn't look too good either, as Scotland faces a climate 'apocalypse', although Great Britain recorded its first fortnight of coal-free electricity generation yesterday.

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