Food waste: what to do about it?
HOW WOULD YOU go about reducing food waste in restaurants?
- serve one less dish than the number of people at a table sharing food?
- serve two fewer dishes to restaurant customers sharing food?
- deduct points from employees’ performance evaluations if customers they serve leave the premises with food still on their plates?
- weigh customers on entering a restaurant to recommend how much food they need?
These ideas are being deployed at the behest of the Chinese government to reduce the nation’s food waste. It follows a directive from President Xi Jinping to restaurants to reduce food waste and practice thriftiness.
How much food is wasted?
Globally, around a third of all food, more than a billion tons, is wasted every year.
“Americans waste roughly 40% of the food produced in the nation. With 41 million Americans facing food insecurity, it’s not a stretch to say that this problem is a crisis”, claims International Policy Digest.
Planning consultancy Arcadis, with RMIT, in a report into food waste in Australia found “that in 2016–17 (the base year):
- Australia produced 7.3 million tonnes of food waste across the supply and consumption chain
- of this, 2.5 million (34%) was created in our homes, 2.3 million tonnes (31%) in primary production and 1.8 million tonnes (25%) in the manufacturing sector
- Australians recycled 1.2 million tonnes of food waste, recovered 2.9 million tonnes through alternative uses for the food waste and disposed of 3.2 million tonnes.”
Food waste is a long-running problem
Some of us will recall how food waste became an issue in Australia around a decade ago. It is still an issue. The Arcadis report highlights the scale of our national waste problem as it stood in 2016–17. It probably hasn’t changed much since.
When food waste attracted the attention of the environmental lobby and sustainability educators a decade ago, state and local government supported campaigns to reduce it. Randwick City Council’s sustainability educator at the time, permaculture practitioner and educator Fiona Campbell, developed content for her community resilience courses in Living Smart and Introduction to Permaculture to educate people in reducing the amount of food waste they created at home.
As food waste became an issue in Australia the focus fell upon the scale of domestic waste in a similar way in which the focus on waste in general, and energy consumption, earlier fell upon individual householders. This individualised what was really a joint household-industry issue. The environmental lobby had much to do with this redirection of responsibility and led environmental campaigner, Helena Norbert-Hodge, to warn against individualising what were institutional problems and letting responsible industry off the hook.
The Arcadis report shows that food waste is as much a responsibility of the food production and distribution industry as it is of householders.
Where now?
A certain volume of food waste is inevitable. Food spoils. The food industry seldom caters to the needs of single and two-person households in supplying economically-priced smaller containers of food. The result is that some of the food is not eaten. When it exceeds its use-by date it is discarded by smaller households, adding to the nation’s food waste problem.
The food waste problem in the commercial sector that Xi Jinping is trying to address was also of concern to some restauranteurs in Australia when food waste first became a social and environmental issue. A small number started food waste recycling initiatives, however they did not catch on in the industry to any significant degree. Some cafes supplied their used coffee grounds to community gardens, where they were composted.
In other Australian initiatives, a small number of cooking-with-leftovers recipe books appeared. Food salvage enterprises like Oz Harvest and Second Bite started-up to salvage leftovers from events and caterers so as to supply food to people in need. Home and community gardeners accepted food wastes from nearby residents and made compost from it to fertilise their gardens.
How will the Covid-19 pandemic affect the volume of food waste? Too soon to say, of course. Speculating, will some of the larger amounts purchased by households during the panic buying period run into their use-by date and go into the waste stream? Much of it was canned and bottled, so it should have a long shelf life, however you can do only do much with a shelf-load of baked beans.
Despite shortages in some lines stemming from distribution centre staff contracting Covid and shelves being emptied by panic buying, the national food supply chain held up during the pandemic, defying the predictions of its critics that its long supply chain was vulnerable to collapse in a crisis. Seem it was more resilient that they thought.
Perhaps Covid might bring home to people the fact that food is the basic need and that we can no longer afford to waste it. Now might be the time to dig-out those cooking-with-leftover recipe books.
Sources
China cracks down on waste with Clean Plates Campaign, raising questions of potential food crisis:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-19/china-fights-food-waste-with-clean-plates-campaign/12569054
International Policy Digest: https://intpolicydigest.org/2020/02/13/reducing-food-waste-in-2020-what-to-know/
Arcadis’ consultancy report (2019)-Working together to reduce food waste in Australia:
https://www.arcadis.com/en/australia/arcadis-blog/richard-collins/working-together-to-reduce-food-waste-in-australia/
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