I’ve worked at a major supermarket chain for eight years now. Most mornings, I fill up around six 15 kg boxes with fruit and veg, so they can be discarded. Grapes that have fallen out of their bag, apples that rolled off the stand, a $20 bag of nuts with a single tear. At the end of the week, we see the dollar value of this ‘waste’ tallying up to thousands of dollars.

The amounts get worse in bakery, with another six to eight boxes being filled up with bread. The everyday sandwich loaf that sits at home in my kitchen for at least a week is thrown away if it doesn’t sell the same day it’s made.

When I started, most of this discarded food would be collected by our food rescue partner SecondBite. Now, I no longer see their familiar red truck. Here and there a smaller charity will come to take some unclaimed food. Mostly I see this leftover food overflowing by the bins. Bundles of bread and crates of dairy left outside until the bin truck arrives.

While these not exactly picture-perfect provisions are going to waste, major food rescue organisations say they still aren’t receiving enough to feed WA’s most vulnerable. How can this be? Is bureaucratic red tape keeping this food from the people who need it most? Why is food insecurity getting worse and what’s life like for families going hungry?

SecondBite delivers discarded fruit and veg from farms and rescued food waste from groceries to its 140 charity partners across WA.

WA state manager Lyndon Nilsson says their warehouse is ‘desperate’ for more food donations.

“We’re about 40% short at the moment on supply versus demand and that’s not factoring in that we do have a waiting list of 35 agency partners.”

Nilsson says the charities they provide to are feeling a squeeze.

“The cost of living and the rental crisis are the two biggest drivers that we see through our community agency partners. Most are experiencing double the demand from people in the community seeking their services.”

Many local charities have had to pause sharing resources to new people seeking help as demand doubles.

Nilsson says food insecurity doesn’t discriminate, as more people have begun to reach out for help.

“There are families where mums and dads are working full-time, but with the cost of living or the rental squeeze, they might be experiencing the fine line between being able to feed the family or having to skip meals.”

Tracy Bain runs Peel Community Kitchen, a café-style community diner which serves free or discounted meals five days a week. She says the demographics of people coming into the kitchen has changed.

“It’s quite sad because it’s a lot of elderly and a lot of young families. Usually, the people we would see would be those living on the street. Now we’re seeing over 100 people a day and that goes across the board – it’s the young, elderly, families, and indigenous people.”

Bain’s community kitchen aims to remove the stigma around seeking help. The kitchen has a menu, free coffee and tea and diners can pay 50 cents for a take-home meal.

“Some families where they’ve got kids at an age where they realise this is a community kitchen are very embarrassed. But once they come in, they realise that with our place, it’s more like going into a café where you happen to get food free.”

2015 was a hard year for my family

After a mental health crisis hit our family and a car breakdown left us immobile, it became increasingly difficult to live on mum’s sole-parent income.

Breakfast was the first meal to disappear. We started becoming dependent on cheap fast food, squeezing as much as we could from vouchers. A mug of hot water would ward off some sensations of hunger, but not much. At my lowest point, I would eat a small amount of toothpaste in place of a dessert.

My siblings and I had to get resourceful – more packet spaghetti was on the menu. For dinner we’d make an improvised ‘shakshuka’ (a tin of beans and two tins of whole tomatoes cooked in a pot). My sister remembers counting down the hours until our mum’s Centrelink payment would come through.

“Missing meals unfortunately became a habit,” Mum says.

“Particularly when your health isn’t what it was, the poverty all around impacts it as well. And that makes difficult health factors more challenging to manage.”

When your default state is hungry, you stop feeling the ache in your stomach. The signs only crop up in headaches and light-headedness.

Soon enough my high school became concerned as to why I was barely coming in. When you don’t have enough food, the energy it takes to leave the house are kilojoules you can’t afford to burn. After the school chaplain visited our home, he decided to come back with some provisions from the school deli. There was more than could fill our freezer. The emotions were overwhelming after such a long time spent thinking no-one cared.

There were conflicting feelings about this in my family of course. We’re a proud bunch and receiving help like this reflected the reality of our situation in a way we hadn’t been able to acknowledge before.

The idea of going back to school was still daunting to me. I’d missed too much. The thought of suddenly reappearing in front of my peers after such a long time away was still too much for me to bear. If they asked where I’d gone, what would I say? So, I never went back. I didn’t finish high school.

I was experiencing a growth spurt around this time. After so long without enough to eat, I found my body looked gawky and unnatural. When food became available to me again, I began binging, having two bowls of porridge in the morning, two tins of beans for lunch and as much peanut butter in between. Overeating to compensate for all the meals I had missed.

As an adult, my friends laughed at how I ‘seagulled’ the leftover food off their plates. I was never embarrassed doing this and laughed along with them but on my way home I couldn’t ignore the feelings of shame.

I realised just how altered my relationship with food was when I met my partner’s family for the first time. Her mother handed me a plate of lettuce leaves and carrot skins which I instinctively started to eat. I was mortified when she revealed they were for the chickens outside. Seeing how other people treated food, small things like it being fine to not finish your plate made me realise my upbringing wasn’t like most people’s.

Experiencing food insecurity greatly changed my relationship with food. When I started working at a supermarket, I saw so much excess and waste in every department of the store. What could be rescued was donated, but so much more had to be put in the bin.

Research from End Food Waste Australia shows that enough food is produced to feed the country three times over. All the while, one in eight households is going hungry.

“Australia is extremely wasteful when it comes to food. We waste more than 100 kg of food per person per year,” says Curtin University professor of sustainability Dora Marinova.

When you include the food supply chain, that number adds up to about 312kg per person.

Estimates from United Nations Environment Programme suggest 8 to 10 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions are associated with food that isn’t eaten – a number three times larger than emissions produced from aviation.

“There has always been a tendency of overproduction,” says Marinova.

“However, what has changed is we have very strict regulations which prevents the major supermarkets from giving away products beyond their use by date. And that generates a lot of excess production.”

SecondBite doesn’t accept donations past their use-by date but does accept long life non-refrigerated goods up to the three months after their best-before date.

In her book Food in a Planetary Emergency, Marinova points toward the industrial revolution as a turning point in modern attitudes to food waste and production.

“The industrial revolution marked the start of a big acceleration in the production of everything, including waste. Management systems, laws and regulations that were put in place aimed at safeguarding people’s wellbeing at the same time allowed them to behave lavishly and wastefully,” Marinova writes.

“Combined with very limited awareness about the environmental footprint of food, the prevailing attitude is that unused food needs to be discarded to make room for new and fresher supplies.”

“This consumerist behaviour does not take into account the limits and implications for the planet and its natural resources, including the ability to continue to produce food.”

Marinova says the most important aspect to reduce waste is behavioural change.

New apps have cropped up in Australia to tackle wasteful attitudes, incentivising cafés and bakeries to bundle their unsold goods to sell in ‘goody bags’ at a lower price at the end of the day instead of going directly to the bin.

Marinova points to the cost of groceries going up as a major challenge for families.

“If you are to shop around to find the cheapest product, it requires a lot of effort. It’s not always possible if you don’t have a car or if you have a family and kids that need to go to school and other activities.”

Tracy Bain says her community kitchen started experiencing more demand due to more people facing an increased cost of living.

“When everything started going up, a lot of people were getting forced out of their houses because they were faced with either paying the extra rent or getting out.”

In 2015, my family and I felt like outsiders. In 2025’s cost of living crisis, hunger has become as intrinsic to the Australian experience as playing cricket in the backyard.

Australian Bureau of Statistics’ latest report on food insecurity shows one in eight households are going hungry. Among the most vulnerable are single parent households like the one I grew up in and group households such as student accommodation and mixed-living arrangements.

One in five families with children up to four-years-old experienced food insecurity. An analysis of the Australian Early Development Census found children who came to their first year of school hungry displayed poorer development in emotional maturity and social competence.

Numbers from ABS show the hardest hit by food insecurity are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Half of indigenous households living in remote areas faced food insecurity where it’s even harder to supply rescued food.

Nilsson says SecondBite is looking into how they can provide resources to remote areas.

“Having sustainable funding to cover the cost of transportation to remote and regional parts of WA it is critical to getting food into the mouths of the people that really need it,” says Nilsson.

A new fleet upgrade now allows SecondBite to distribute as far as Narrogin and food rescue giant FoodBank has opened a warehouse in Bunbury.

In our cost-of-living crisis, anyone can be hit with food insecurity. It’s more than likely someone you know is having to choose between paying rent and buying ingredients for dinner.

SecondBite WA State Manager Lyndon Nilsson says even though many charities are working with a limited amount of resources, the demand shows they are sorely needed.