When it comes to reducing food waste, Matt Homewood isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. As Instagram’s An Urban Harvester, he’s amassed a sizeable following documenting the shocking amount of edible food supermarkets send to the bin on a regular basis. It’s no job for those with queasy stomachs, but nor is it something for the pessimists. We get Matt’s dumpster-view take on the reasons food waste remains such an intractable problem, as well as why he chooses to stay positive about the future.
If you live in Copenhagen and shop for groceries at your local supermarket, there’s a chance you’ve seen Matt Homewood around.
Rather than stalking the aisles, however, the London transplant can usually be found at the back of the store, rummaging through the dumpster.
Known by his Instagram handle, @anurbanharvester, Matt’s mission is to expose supermarkets’ “dirty secrets” by documenting the perfectly good food they throw out every day.
And, on most occasions, he doesn’t have to look very hard.
Even in a place like Copenhagen, which enjoys a reputation as one of Europe’s most sustainable cities, the sheer amount of edible food Matt turns up on a regular basis is mind boggling.
Among other things, his hauls have included 157 packets of bacon, 300 litres of cow’s milk, and even 1,000 Euros worth of cheese.
The reasons so much food ends up in the supermarket dumpster are many and varied, including wasteful stock management practices – especially when it comes to use-by dates for perishable products – as well as stringent aesthetic requirements for fruit and vegetables.
But, while it’s one thing to describe what the effects of this look like, it’s another to see it meticulously laid out on the floor of Matt’s apartment or packed into a small fridge.
The images are a shocking representation of a problem that remains invisible to many people.
In Denmark, for example, it’s estimated that supermarkets throw out 96,000,000 kilograms of food annually. And waste on that scale is hardly unique to Scandinavia.
According to a recent report, almost 20 per cent of food produced in the EU is thrown out each year, with significant environmental and humanitarian cost.
Food waste in the EU alone accounts for 6 per cent of the bloc’s total greenhouse gas emissions, but it also remains a glaring reflection of global inequity – with record levels of hunger and food insecurity around the world rising year by year.
The Waste Business
Matt believes the problem is a symptom of a broken system, which incentivises food waste by supermarkets while placing a disproportionate part of the blame for the issue on consumers and farmers.
“Consumers are wasting their money when they waste food, whereas supermarkets, with their national business models, are actually making big money.”
“These business models factor in food waste as a percentage of annual turnover – between 1 per cent and 5 per cent of the annual turnover for the entirety of the store – into the recommended retail price. So, ironically, when we go to the supermarket, we’re actually financing [food waste].”
Despite this, Matt says the way we account for food waste – as opposed to ‘loss’ – often obscures the outsized role supermarkets have in creating waste along the supply chain, effectively leaving the bulk of the responsibility at the door of the farmer and the consumer.
“Food loss, under the United Nations definition, is from the farm up until the supermarket, but excluding retail; and food waste is retail and consumers. That’s why, when you Google who is responsible for food waste, it will always be the household.”
“There are two or three thousand supermarkets in Denmark, for example, and there are six million people, more or less. So of course there’s going to be more food waste in households. But on a per-actor basis – per store, per consumer – it’s completely different.”
“The farmer is not wasting 10 or 20 tonnes of carrots because he or she wants to. It’s because an order has been cancelled by a supermarket who’ve probably mismanaged their ordering process.”
“Rewriting these definitions,” Matt says, “is a big job”, made even more complicated by an uneven balance of power between the key players. With so much leverage concentrated in the hands of so few, change at the political level is difficult.
“You’ve really only got a few companies who run the whole show – and that’s at the seed level, it’s at the pesticide and fertiliser level, and it’s especially at the retail level.”
“If the politicians were to say, “We’re going to bring in a food waste tax,” Aldi, for example, who employ – I imagine – tens of thousands if not one or two hundred thousand people can really push back, because that’s a lot of tax and a lot of livelihoods at stake.”
An Urban Harvester
Despite being a long-time environmental crusader, it was only during a cycling trip to the US in 2017 that Matt clicked to the shocking amount of food supermarkets waste each day.
“The scale of it was just unbelievable.”
And, on relocating to Denmark to study climate change science, he discovered things in the ‘world’s greenest city’ weren’t much different.
“The Europeans often have a tendency to bash the Americans, when actually this continent is just as bad.”
“The contents of the dumpsters were different – so more whole foods and fresh foods – but the quantities were still shocking.”
While he knew he wanted to draw awareness to the issue, Matt says that, initially, he just didn’t know how.
“Ideally, it would have been much better to do investigative reporting, but I don’t speak or write Danish that well. So I said, ‘Okay, let’s use a combination of art and activism.’”
An Urban Harvester was born – or at least his prototype.
“I was anonymous for the first year, because I really wanted it to be focused on the food, not the person behind it,” Matt says.
“And, because I was doing everything by bicycle, it took hours and hours and hours – bringing all this food back, laying it out and photographing it with the DSLR cameras.”
Matt would eventually put his face to the account, honing his process as he went, and before long his shocking images began gaining traction – not only in Denmark but also around the world.
He was invited to speak at the COP26 summit, and, in 2021, he was awarded a UN Sustainable Development Goals prize – the Fiery Soul Award (“ildsjælsprisen”) – for his work to raise awareness about waste.
An Opportunity Not to be Wasted
All this is testament to the power of Matt’s message. However, reminders of the long road ahead are only ever as far away as the next dumpster.
Real change depends on building viable alternatives to a system that has passed its use-by date:
“In a way, my initial goal wasn’t just to focus on food waste. It was more to pinpoint that, while food waste is an inherent part of this modern industrial food system, there are many alternatives.”
“Through the internet, one can move probably 60 to 70 per cent of one’s disposable income spent on food away from from the supermarket supply chains. And, not only that, the food you buy from those businesses is often much better. They’re better priced, and the taste and nutrition is often superior too, although that’s often hard to test quantitatively.”
By highlighting alternatives, Matt’s hope is that more of us start to question our own place in the modern food system, as well as the real impact changing our consumption habits can have on our lives.
“Food really is at the heart of everything, and food is going to solve – or not solve – our planetary problems.”
“I think the benefits of reducing your own food waste are very tangible for people like you and me, because we can actually save a lot of money.”
“And yes, okay, you can become more environmentally friendly, but you’ll also eat much better and you’ll feel better. Your whole diet and lifestyle will likely improve, too.”