Just as Geneva prepares to unveil its long-awaited legislation on the right to food, a familiar propaganda wave is crashing over the city—one that stinks more than any compost bin ever could.
Suddenly, articles and “studies” are sprouting like mushrooms after rain, all chanting the same convenient mantra: households are the biggest source of food waste. You’ve heard it. Maybe even from a celebrity chef or two, co-opted into repeating the line. Poor planning, picky eaters, laziness—they say. As if the problem starts and ends at your fridge.
This is not only false. It’s strategically false.
Behind the myth is a system desperate to deflect attention away from its core dysfunction: a private food industry built on waste, opacity, and profit-maximized excess. Supermarkets overstock to appear abundant, reject entire harvests over aesthetic standards, and dump food rather than mark it down. But don’t worry—when they write their sustainability reports, they reclassify all that loss as “revalorized by-products” or “non-food use.” Voilà—no waste.
And when it comes to Geneva, the timing isn’t just suspicious. It’s insulting.
At the very moment we are supposed to be recognizing food as a constitutional right—not a market leftover—the narrative shifts. From systemic accountability to individual guilt. From confronting extractive models to counting potato peels.
This shift is not accidental. It is scripted. And the UNEP Food Waste Index Report 2024 has provided the perfect screenplay.
The report claims global household food waste reaches 631 million tonnes per year—roughly 79 kilos per person. But what the glossy charts and colorful maps conceal is the methodological sleight of hand behind these numbers. The data comes from 93 countries, sure—but most of it is extrapolated, modeled, or pieced together from studies with wildly varying methods. Subnational pilot audits from cities in Kenya or India, based on 90 households, are lumped together with retail mass-balance figures from European supermarket chains and packaged as universal truth.
Meanwhile, the retail sector, one of the real engines of waste, is quietly let off the hook. Why? Because outside of a few high-income countries, there is almost no data. The solution? UNEP fills the void with estimates—guesswork dressed in technocratic robes—then uses these to justify policies that just happen to align perfectly with private-sector interests.
This critique echoes what scholars have warned about for years: the over-reliance on modeled data in global food policy obscures power relations and shields large corporations from accountability. See for instance:
And if you read the UNEP report closely, the agenda becomes crystal clear: public-private partnerships (PPPs) are proposed as the silver bullet. It’s the same tired model: the ones who generate the waste get paid to “solve” it. Corporations become both problem and savior. They feed their unsold surplus to the hungry, and we’re supposed to clap. Meanwhile, the public is told to weigh their kitchen scraps and feel shame.
This is the green capitalism of the food system: superficial fixes, repackaged guilt, and no accountability. Just like with climate change, where Big Oil taught us to calculate our carbon footprint while they lobbied against emissions cuts, the food industry is now telling us to stop wasting broccoli stems while they burn tonnes of edible food in incinerators for energy credits.
This whole consumer-blaming narrative, dressed up in polite NGO language and sustainability jargon, collapses the moment we say out loud what no one at the table seems willing to: the real problem is overproduction. The food system doesn’t produce too little. It produces too much, on purpose, every single day, because that’s the only way profit can be extracted.
The system is designed for volume. The more you grow, the more you ship, the more you sell—or try to sell—the more the illusion of success holds. And when it doesn't sell? That’s fine too. Write it off. Feed it to biodigesters. Burn it for energy. Or dump it in landfills. As long as the inventory keeps moving on paper, the machine keeps humming. This isn’t food—it’s throughput. The waste isn’t a byproduct. It’s built in.
And then we turn around and tell the public to reduce their food waste? As if the solution is meal planning, not structural degrowth. As if consumers were the ones demanding 40 different types of apples year-round. As if the problem was forgetting leftovers, not a global market that discards edible food to keep prices high and shelves full.
The truth is this entire paternalistic obsession with individual food waste behavior is a distraction—and worse, it's a moral alibi. It creates a sense of civic virtue while leaving the growth logic of the food industry untouched. It allows corporations and supermarkets to greenwash their operations and boast about donating expired yogurts, all while expanding operations, launching new stores, increasing shelf-space, pushing volume-driven consumption, and marketing perpetual indulgence.
Let’s be honest: if the real solution is to consume less, then we are dealing with a direct contradiction. No corporation, no supermarket, and no retail association wants to hear that. Their survival depends on consumption increasing—not decreasing. It depends on you throwing just enough food away to buy more. On confusion, over-choice, impulse purchases, and logistical inefficiencies. On externalizing the costs of disposal while internalizing the profits of sale.
So when the same actors call for food waste awareness weeks and sponsor food-saving apps, we must ask: is this reform, or is it rebranding? Is it transition, or is it containment?
Because unless we are ready to challenge the forever-growth model of the industrial food system—unless we’re ready to say enough to the sacred cow of GDP growth—then let’s not pretend that shaming households for trashing a bruised tomato is doing anything to solve hunger, waste, or climate breakdown.
So let’s be clear:
Food waste is a system failure, not a consumer flaw.
We cannot build a just food system by criminalizing households while industrial actors remain unregulated and subsidized.
Any right to food legislation that doesn’t confront this imbalance is not a right—it’s a performance.
And in Geneva, where we’ve spent years fighting to center dignity, sustainability, and justice through projects like the Refettorio Geneva, we refuse to play along. We feed people with rescued food, not rebranded myths. We build kitchens of resistance, not laboratories of guilt.
The right to food cannot be built on the backs of the very people it claims to protect—while the real culprits rebrand themselves as solution providers.
If you want a right to food that means something, start by naming the real source of waste: a system designed to throw food away, not feed people. Stop pointing at the fridge. Start pointing at the boardroom.