How I learned I had 38 slaves working for me
Food transparency — If you knew what is on your food, would you eat the same?
This Wednesday, April 29th we “celebrated” #StopFoodWasteDay and I thought it would be a good idea to dedicate this week’s article to food. I absolutely love food, my godparents gave me my first cooking book as a christmas present when I was five, something that sparked a love affair between the kitchen and myself that is very much alive today. However, when tackling writing about food and relating it to transparency and technology I must admit that I struggled at first. Eventually, and since EnlightAID’s ultimate goal is to contribute to a sustainable way of life for the planet and people, I decided to stick to the “enlight” portion and share how I began to truly care about what is on my plate.
Three years ago I attended a conference about Social Entrepreneurship in the Netherlands, there among other speakers was a person from a chocolate brand I had never heard of before: Tony’s Chocolonely. I can’t remember who from the brand spoke that day, but what he said had a profound impact on me. He spoke about how many of the workers in the cocoa plantations in Ghana and Ivory Coast are victims of modern slavery. For this article, I went back to their website to find the exact numbers. Roughly 60% of the world’s chocolate is produced in Ghana and Ivory Coast where the average cocoa farmer earns 46 cents of an euro per day¹, clearly not a living wage. Moreover, over two million children work on the farms. “Worse still, recent findings confirm that at least 30.000 people are victims of modern slavery. They are adults and children that are forced to work on cocoa plantations and do not get paid. There are probably more victims, because no research has been done about areas in which cocoa is farmed illegally in the first place.”²
Why am I telling you this? Well, before that conference I had never thought about where the chocolate I ate came from or even had any clue there could be slavery involved in its production. This lack of transparency on where the raw materials for the chocolate I loved so much came from had made me an involuntary supporter of this practice. The acknowledgment of this very real fact I had never heard before sparked my curiosity and I must admit, a lot of guilt. True to form, I began a journey of research about what is on my table every day. If I knew the social and environmental impact of each product, would I still choose the same products?
Being aware of what we consume is key to building a more sustainable future. While researching for this article, I discovered Slaveryfootprint.org, a website focused on allowing individuals to understand their connection to modern-day slavery. With an online calculator that goes through your habits and consumption patterns, it shows you an estimate of how many slaves are working for you today. I took the test and the answer was 38 slaves! Based on my habits, which I thought were reasonably ok, there are 38 people who are abused to produce the goods I have at home. I found the exercise both interesting and heartbreaking, the only thing I would have liked is to have the possibility to deep dive into which specific habits I need to modify to ensure the number goes to zero as soon as possible.
The social impact of the food in our table
Chocolate is not the only product in the food industry proven to use slaves in their production processes. Indian families are forced to work in the Bangladesh tea industry, migrants from Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia work under similar conditions on shrimp farms in Thailand, while palm oil plantations in Malaysia are sustained based on forced labor³, these are just a few examples. It is reputable brands who in most cases, unintendedly, are causing this situation because they don’t know where all the materials come from. “That’s where you find the slaves. In the fields. In the mines. In the raw materials processing… and it’s a supply chain that enslaves more people than at any time in human history”⁴.
Slavery is far from being the only problem related to food we need to consider when bringing it to our tables. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), about 1.3 billion tons of food are wasted every year, which is equivalent to a third of the total amount produced for human consumption. Even though enough food is produced globally, FAO has stated that 704 million people experienced Severe Food Insecurity in 201⁸⁵. How could this be possible if by recuperating only 25% of the food wasted globally could feed all of the people currently experiencing severe hunger⁶.
We have a fundamental problem in the allocation of resources, “Income inequality is rising in nearly half of the countries in the world, including many low- and middle-income countries… Inequality increases the likelihood of severe food insecurity, and the prevalence of severe food insecurity is almost three times higher in countries with high income inequality (21 percent) compared with countries with low income inequality (7 percent)⁷.
The Environmental impact
Food production is not exempt from having an impact on the environment and certain industries score worse than others. As agricultural land expands, it causes deforestation and loss of biodiversity, the most damaging being animal agriculture. Meat production is responsible for 91% of Amazon destruction as land is cleared to make space for animals, mainly for cows to graze. Every second, between four and eight thousand square meters of rainforest are cleared to make room for these animals. Moreover, livestock and their byproducts are responsible for 51% of the Global Greenhouse Emissions, a number that blew my mind away.
Going back to what yesterday represented, #StopFoodWasteDay, it seemed important to also think about the fact that wasting food implies wasting the resources embedded in its production. This means that a third of the resources used to grow, processing, packaging, transporting and marketing that food is lost. “28% percent of the world’s agricultural land grows crops that are wasted. That equals the total land area of China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan”⁸, plus the equivalent to the water that would be needed to cover all of the world’s household needs. Just a single hamburger has an embedded water footprint equivalent to showering for 2 months⁹. How many hamburgers are lost in every single McDonalds? As data and questions piled up in my head I froze, wondering if I should go back into bed and never come back. How could I continue to write without making myself and you, the reader, feel guilty and overwhelmed by all of this information. After what felt like forever I decided to include a list of practical things you can do to help ending this problem.
What to do today?
I cannot provide you with a fail-proof system that covers every single thing you can do to end the social and environmental problems associated with food production today, but I have prepared a short list of suggestions that can help you get started. Please, don’t try to change everything at once. I tried, and failed many times to the point that at some stage in the last three years I went back to using all of the products I wanted to avoid in the first place. I recommend starting slow, one step at the time.
I would suggest to first try to not waste food that is already at home, if by your next trip to the store you still have some food, make sure older products are left in the front sections of your fridge and pantry so they can be used first, before they go bad.
Try creating a meal plan before going to the grocery store next time, this way you will know beforehand what to buy ensuring you have what you need at home but no extra food that can potentially go to waste. Eat before you go to the grocery store, you are more likely to become tempted to buy things you don’t really need if you are hungry.
Cook at home. In order for restaurants to ensure sufficient stock so you can order whatever you want when you are there, they must have a surplus of ingredients in their kitchens. Large amounts of this food goes to waste, this is also true if you order takeout. Since a lot of us must stay at home as the Coronavirus pandemic continues to be around us, now is the perfect time to experiment with new recipes or even learn to cook at home if you have never done it before.
Feeling like rewarding yourself with some takeout this weekend? No problem, order to share. If you live with family or friends you can order a few dishes to share instead of one for yourself and end up having too much.
Have a vegetarian or vegan day of the week, as you have read, a diet sustained on animal products has a much larger impact on the environment. Once you have mastered one day a week you can start increasing that ratio.
Try buying local products, even better if you have the opportunity to buy directly from the producers at a farmers market. If that is not possible, like with chocolate for example, try finding certified Fair Trade products, which ensure people working across the production process have a living wage.
Stay informed, and try to make conscious decisions. You may have heard this a million times, but our purchasing choices represent an actual vote, and our daily choices count. Since a long weekend is rapidly approaching I have prepared a short list of documentaries you can watch to help you navigate from today’s habits into more sustainable food related decisions.
The Dark Side of Chocolate — This was the first documentary I watched on the topic when I came home after being in the event in the Netherlands. I was in disbelief regarding the extent of slavery in the industry and this movie helped me to better understand the scale of the problem.
Cowspiracy — I must admit it took me about a year to dare to watch this one, I was happily eating steak at the time and I didn’t want to be confronted with the very real animals behind the meat I was eating. I was surprised to learn how the problem went beyond being faced with the obvious fact that I was eating what had previously been alive cows and pigs.
Cooked — This one is a short series and it’s not specifically related to sustainability. It only has four episodes and each one of them explores an element related to food: fire, air, earth and water. It made me fall in love again with certain processes we tend to discard as annoying in everyday cooking, because at some point society convinced us we needed to spend more time outside of the kitchen. After watching this series I began to bake bread at home and learned the beauty of sourdough and its nutritional value in comparison to the store bought, prepackaged bread. We have not bought bread since, and happily baked for years now, successfully reducing waste there.
Rotten — This one is also a series, and I must admit that as a Chilean I have a special appreciation for the episode that speaks about avocado, the first episode of the second season. It speaks among other things on how it is possible to have luscious avocado trees on one side of a valley and people and animals dying for lack of water on the other.
Last but not least, I want to invite you to join us for an open conversation on food sustainability and how to reduce food waste with small actions everyday. @mejor.tarde.que.nunca a sustainability gury based in Chile and myself (@enlightaid) will be hosting our first Instagram Live this May 1st at 12pm Chile time (GMT-4), 6pm Berlin time (CEST).
Disclosure
I am not a vegan, I haven’t even managed to be a 100% vegetarian. I grew up in a region where most important celebrations are done next to a barbeque and walking away from certain products has not been an easy road. Even though I haven’t bought meat in months, there is cheese and some other animal products in my fridge. Occasionally some food goes to waste in my kitchen as well. I try to buy only fair trade chocolate but that also does not work every time. My road to food sustainability, as the world’s to food transparency, has still a long way to go.
