You know it, and everybody knows it - supermarkets throw away great amounts of food. The fact makes people upset, and means additional emission of CO2. In spite of adding up to GDP, as more economic acts are performed, most people tend to look at the phenomenon as good for nothing.

The problems seems to arise from the size of the business. Big supermarket chains, and the agro-industry deal with so much food, that the cost of each item is reduced to waste. This puts a great deal of pressure on farmers, which makes the protest from time to time outside the EU headquarters in Bruxelles.

But maybe it is too easy to put all the blame on the supermarket chains, and free the farmer from responsibility. You remember our Michael? He was a man of many opinions, also about Swedish farmers: Here we don't have a tradition, like in France or Italy, of farmers producing consumatives on their own farms. Swedish farmers prefer to send their products to the food industry and not do anything themselves. For sure, Michael is an entrepeneur, and it is not ecological concerns that guide him. But his clients love to buy locally produced food, and he takes in so much as he can. Like apples from a farm nearby. Michael sells both the apples and the juice that is made on the farm. This kind of initiatives he wants to see more of. So do I - these apples give profits to the local community, and deliver sweet indulgence without being transported around the world.

Here we have a potential win-win-win situation. The farmer gets better paied and develop his competence. The consumer gets better food. Michael can afford to sell less while earning more, as the profit margin on locally produced goods are way higher than on low-cost food. Maybe a number of lorry-drivers would be unemployed, but in general local production will be more labour intensive, so the number of jobs might increase. Maybe they can become apple farmers?

The lorry-driver turned apple-farmer is of course an attemt at finding a catchy example. But actually it illustrates the two maybe strongest assets of increasing local production - less transports (if they are short enough they can be carried out with bikes) and rural entrepeneurship. I think our society needs young farmers, who work the land profitable, and with ideas. Only so can our thinking stay connected to the ecology we live from, and crises like the current climate crisis be.

Maybe I don't even have to buy locally produced apples by Michael, maybe I can grow my own. Sweden might not have a very good climate for gardening, but on the other hand we are blessed with space. We are one of Europe's most sparsely populated countries, you can see that with your bare eye. The distance from house to house gives space for much more gardens than we have today. I hope politicians will realize this potential when they try to make cities and communities climate-friendly.

Urban farming is nothing new. In 1895 the first allotment gardens were arranged in Sweden, the concept reached us from Germany. Allotment gardens were widely popular among the expanding working class in the early 20th cenury, many of whome had a countryside background and knew well how to grow food. During the world year, the state actively supported allotment gardening as a way to guarantee food safety, but since then usage has declined. But tehy still exist So I followed my friend Jens and his son Leo to their allotment one rainy afternoon, to see how urban gardening can look like in reality. Here are some pictures...

The local authorities give anyone a piece of land, given that the promise to use only ecological methods of farming, and pay a minor sum, today 20 EUR a year. This area is quite rough, since it was abandonded some years ago, when the railroad was supposed to go over this land. Nonetheless, it gives Jens all the apples he could ever dream of, and potatoes from the summer until christmas. Without CO2-emissions... think about how natural that sounds when you talk about allotments, and how compicated it is to achieve for a supermarket.

His neighbours were more ambitious, and their work was well awarded... they had potatoes, tomatoes, beans, and lots of other vegetables for most of the year. And they knew a lot, would never stop talking about how to grow, what to grow. These flowers for example, are not only fancy, but help keeping bugs and birds away from the plants.

I am a teacher, not a farmer, and this was what impressed me most. The knowledge about how we can grow food thatmost of us simply don't have. But we could learn. And I am sure we will have to, if we really want to adress climate change.

What would you say? Is there a way to stop the waste? How could we do that?