Why binning your leftovers is a moral issue: just ask the Tudors

Legal requirements to donate leftovers to the poor, punishments for those who don’t and enforced childhood lessons about the importance of not wasting food. No, this is not 2050. This is Tudor England. In an extract from her book ‘Leftovers’, Eleanor Barnett shows us what the past can teach us about the future of food waste

In present day, food waste is presented in secular terms as an affront to environmental sustainability (Getty/iStock)

Like today, wasting food in Tudor and Stuart England was an issue deeply laden with moral implications. During the 16th-century Reformation, when England transitioned from a Catholic country under the pope to a Protestant state under the crown, a religious mindset underlined all aspects of daily life.

While food waste today is presented in secular terms as an affront to environmental sustainability, writers of the early modern period saw food as a gift from God: to waste it was to abuse and reject God’s heavenly benevolence.

People believed food physically sustained earthly life by literally replenishing the flesh that was used up day-to-day. And it was food that Christ had chosen to represent his body and blood in the sacrament of the Eucharist.