4R approach to food waste reduction
Food waste is the most often disregarded type of waste and governmental regulations for its management are either non-existence or in its infancy.
According to the Food and Agricultural organization (FAO), one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption is wasted. This is app. 1, 3 billion tons of food every year! It easy to assess the source of this waste, where the share per capita waste by consumers is between 95–115 kg/year in Europe.
With this article, I would like to talk about food waste and how we as consumers can try to diminish it within our everyday activities.
How to prevent food waste in our every-day life?
The way forward to handle food waste and waste in general lies within ‘’4R’’ Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Rethink. Let’s be honest, waste in general is here to stay and no matter how hard we try to decrease it, we will continue to produce it at some level e.g. through our biological needs. Thus, the answer is within finding ways to recover and reuse the waste and not let it end up in landfills.
So how, can we use the 4R approach to our food waste? The below list is what I use for reducing my food waste:
Reduce
To reduce is the easiest way to handle food waste within a household. The trick is to measure how much food is consumed by you and your family and not to prepare more than what is going to be eaten on one/two sittings.
A few tips:
Shop with purpose: Prepare meal plans for the week and have a good idea of the products you need. Hence, when you go to the shop, you will be able to buy only the ingredients you need and at the same time save money.
Serve only what you can eat: While preparing the meals, do not overserve food. You should know how much you could eat and that goes also for your family. So follow the ‘’80%’’ rule and eat until you feel 80% full, which means do not overload your plate with food you will have to throw out.
Save and eat leftovers: this is something that many households are doing, but how many are actually eating them. I have a lot of friends, which say that they can only eat one time of the same meal!?
Either you are good at preparing one time meals without throwing food or learn to eat your leftovers. Not going for the second time of the same meal is pure capricious.
Avoid clutter: Just as some people try to avoid clutter of stuff in their homes, we need to implement the same principles for our fridges and food shelves. Before going to the shop, look at the fridge, see what you have in it, what is your meal plan for this week. It will give you a good idea of what actually you need to buy.
Keep a food diary: this could be very useful, if you leave in a big household, where the fridge is always full. The food diary can first help with keep tracking what you waste and be a comprehensive guide for expiration and sell-by dates. I haven’t actually personally implemented such a tool in my everyday life, as we are two people household, but I can definitely see the benefit, if you have to prepare food for 3,4,5 people every day.
Reuse
Be creative! Google is full of recipes on how to use the same products and leftovers for different meals e.g. lovefoodhatewaste.com. I usually make a certain amount of tomato sauce with vegetables and soy in the beginning of the week, which can be used for pasta meals, rice meals or for burgers. Thus, I have different meal for at least 2–3 days.
Recycle
Food recycling could be a challenge and not everybody will dedicate the time for it. When, I say recycling, I refer to composting i.e. turning certain foods into nutrient-rich fertilizer. EPA has a very interesting Food recovery hierarchy. Check it out.
Rethink
Rethink our lifestyle, our consumer choices, our values, in order to decrease our environmental impact. Definitely easy said than done. We all want the latest version of the new iPhone, the nice dress or pants from the shop window, the best-looking fruit in the shop.
However, how often do we ask the questions; do I really need that right now? Do I have a meal plan and know what to buy, when I go to the shop? Most of the times, the answers are NO! We need to rethink every single choice we make every day, from the perspective of decreasing our impact. We need to be creative and stop relying on ready-go solutions.
Waste free life: myth of reality?
Even though, it sounds as something out of a fairytale, waste free life at a certain degree is possible. A couple of years ago, I found a youtube video of Bea Johnson, who, together with her family have been living a waste free life since 2008. Check out the video on how she did it.
Sum up
Food waste is an issue and all of us have a contribution to that. Thus, in order to handle the problem adequately we need to start from our every-day lives. Rethink our personal choices and implement behavioral changes, which lead to sustainable lives for us and the rest of humanity.
Use 4Rs approach for reducing your food waste and remember ‘’795 000 000 people are suffering from chronic undernourishment and 1 300 000 000 tons of food is wasted/yearly’’, IFPRI and FAO 2016. The change starts with us!
