I had to bin that chicken.
The food we throw out is warming the planet, but to solve the problem we need to attack the issue on multiple fronts.
I had a feeling when I pulled the chicken pieces out of the fridge for dinner.
When I checked the best before date, both packages said the 11th of May. I looked at the date on my watch: 11th of May.
But when I cut open both packages, one package had that distinct odour of beginning-to-rot meat. Even after rinsing with cold water, the odour remained, so I binned it, not wanting to take the chance with a potential case of salmonella.
Whenever this happens — and it happens rarely — it always feels like I’m throwing money into the bin. It’s frankly frustrating that I cannot manage my own food properly to ensure it doesn’t get wasted.
Apparently, I’m not alone.
In North America, just under 16% of food is lost in the pre-retail market (from harvest to wholesaler), while another 17% is wasted in the retail, food service and consumer markets. Put together, that’s basically one-third of all food that is produced either doesn’t get to consumers in the first place, or is thrown out by consumers when things begin to go bad in the fridge.
According to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) Canadians, on average, pitch out 79 kilograms of food per year, per person. Other figures from the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, peg this number at 105.5 kg per household pre-pandemic, and 119.6 kg per household post-pandemic. Using the Dalhousie data, and combining that with Statistics Canada data on the current number of Canadian households (14 million) that’s a whopping 1.5 to 1.6 billion kilograms of food waste per year. And that’s just the household waste; this doesn’t include the food lost in the pre-retail portion of the food chain, nor does it include food service or retail.
On a global level, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) has calculated that the amount of food wasted and diverted to landfill emits an equivalent of 3.3 Gtonnes of CO2 equivalent per year, which makes food waste the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the United States and China.
How does food waste create greenhouse gases? Food that ends up in a landfill is typically covered over with other refuse. As the food has no or little access to oxygen, it rots in an anaerobic state (i.e., is broken down by micro-organisms) and creates methane. Methane has about 80 times the warming power as CO2 so finding a solution to this will help reduce emissions immensely.
For the past decade or longer, the underlying mantra was that the blame for waste rested on consumers; they were the ones who were needlessly throwing food out to be collected by our regular collection infrastructure, and ending up in landfills where it rotted. An example: FeedOntario (a collective of food relief organizations in the province of Ontario) stated in an article posted to its site in 2018, that ‘the biggest culprit in food waste is the average consumer’. This discourse was then used as the primary rationale to introduce organic waste recycling — a measure that successfully removes organic matter from landfills and in turn, reduces the production of greenhouse gas emissions — but doesn’t address the instinct and habit to discard unused food.
The good news is that the FAO has refined its data collection methodology regarding food waste, and has divided the problem into two key areas: food lost (from harvest to wholesaler/distributor) and food waste (food not sold in retail or binned in the food service and consumer markets). This redefinition of the problem removes the emphasis of the problem from individual consumers and distributes the problem more evenly across the food chain. With the updated data and better definitional framework, we know that it’s not just the consumer that is responsible, but also, producers, distributers, retailers and food service companies that are part of the problem and share an overall responsibility to find solutions.
The obvious question is: what the heck do we do about this?
Governments and the private sector are showing signs of a willingness to address this problem.
The Federal Government has gone the way of providing seed funding to the private sector to stimulate the creation of solutions. In November of 2020, the Federal Department of Agriculture and Agri-food launched a food waste reduction challenge. This first tranche of funding is designed to assist organizations (more than just the private sector, but community, indigenous, individuals, local governments and academics) to develop solutions that divert food waste all along the production chain, from farm to plate. Two additional streams of funding will be announced this year with the focus on technological solutions that either extend the life of food, or find ways to transform food that would otherwise be lost.
The Government of Québec has acknowledged that this is a problem, but doesn’t have specific programs in place to spur the development of solutions. They offer basic advice for individuals on how to reduce their food waste in the home, but that appears to be the extent of their concern, for the moment. There’s nothing there to incite producers, retailers and the food services industry to do better. Even the government’s latest plan to reduce greenhouse gases seems to have missed this element of the equation.
In the meantime, there are a number of private sector organizations that are stepping up to assist consumers to find cut-price food items, while at the same time, assist retail partners to divert food to consumers that would otherwise be binned.
Flashfood and FoodHero are two companies that rely on partnering with national grocery chains to identify food items that are close to their anticipated ‘sell-by’ dates, making those items available in a virtual marketplace via a smart-phone app, and selling those items at cut-rates to encourage their quick sale. A consumer makes their selections in the app and once completed, goes to a particular store and finds those items in specially marked coolers or sections of the store for pick-up. Each are harnessing the ubiquity of smartphone apps combined with the underlying mission of diverting food that would otherwise be wasted into the hands of consumers.
Both companies are private, so they don’t necessarily report statistics on how successful their model is at diverting food to consumers that would otherwise be binned. That said, Flashfood claims early successes as they’ve rolled out to a large number of national grocery chains across the country. Between both apps, you can pretty much cover off any major grocery store in the country. It will be interesting to see if there’s room in the market for more than two or three players, as each needs some kind of infrastructure at the grocery store level and it is unlikely that grocers have the real estate to support many of these solutions at the same time.
Second Harvest is arguably Canada’s largest food charity organization. Since 1985, the organization has made it its mission to re-distribute food that could be binned to social services organizations to be distributed to communities in need. Acting as an essential logistics bridge between the retail sector and community organizations, Second Harvest accepts food donated from their partners — many of whom are national grocery chains — and quickly distributes them to community organizations across the country. Since its inception, it has successfully diverted (‘rescued’) 177 million pounds of food which has translated into 192 million pounds less greenhouse gas emissions being emitted into the atmosphere.
Just in 2020, the pandemic forced them to implement their carefully mapped out 3-year national expansion plan — that they worked hard on during 2019 — in a matter of mere weeks, but it paid off as they rapidly evolved their online platform to assist them in their fundraising efforts and augmented their logistical capabilities to roll out a record-breaking 22 million pounds of food to 1.3 million Canadians in over 500 communities in all thirteen provinces and territories in the country.
In addition to partnering with players such as Foodhero and Second Harvest, grocery chains in Canada are taking some actions of their own. Sobey’s — the corporate owner of such brands as IGA, Safeway and Thrifty Foods — is taking a number of steps as part of their commitment to social responsibility to reduce food waste, increase sustainable food sourcing and reduce overall packaging waste. For the most recent year reported (May 5th, 2019 to May 2nd, 2020), Sobey’s has removed plastic bags from checkouts in all their stores, diverted the equivalent of 9 million meals worth of food from surplus stocks by donating that food through a network of community organizations and added more than 2,900 products from local growers and producers, helping to augment food sovereignty.
The pandemic has produced a bumper crop of home cooks. The data seem to indicate that more of us are cooking all of our meals at home. At the beginning of the pandemic, it was a necessity, given that everything was closed down, and we really had no choice in the matter. This would explain the rise in the amount of food wasted in the home as noted noted above. We bought more, we cooked more but we may not have the right instincts to consume leftovers as quickly as we would like, or have purchased too much a particular ingredient. There have been some funny stories of people purchasing items online, only to end up with far more than they bargained for. Like the woman who wanted 20 lemons, but added a zero and got 200 instead. Or another who thought they were ordering four tomatoes, but got four pounds of tomatoes.
We’ve all had more time to experiment than before. We didn’t need to grab a quick breakfast at the food court before hitting our desk at work. We did that at home, and because we didn’t have someone else doing the preparing, we fell to doing it ourselves. I learned how to air dry a steak in my fridge, brine a chicken that came out absolutely fabulous after roasting and I can now whip up a mean Hummus made with garlic confit and made fluffier and silkier with the addition of a bit of cold water near the end of the processing time. My ‘desk’ is the formal dining room table, next to the kitchen, so, if I have some quick prep to do before dinner, it’s easy enough for me to find the time to do it.
I don’t measure the food wasted in my home, but my feeling is that there is more going into the organic waste bin that ever. Carrot tops, kale stems, tomato cores, garlic husks, carrot peels, chicken bones — I know that a lot of that can be converted into some other derivative product, but it comes down to time. I spend a lot more time in meal prep already; as the principal cook in the house — even just for two people — its at least once per day, if not twice. I still gotta work the day job, and write this article as well!
And then there’s my chicken that went bad.
It was really about the ‘best before dates’. The dates’ function is fairly well circumscribed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. A ‘best before’ date on a package is intended to communicate the end of the durable life period of a particular food. The ‘durable life’ of a particular food is further defined as ‘the anticipated amount of time that an unopened food product, when stored under appropriate conditions, will retain its freshness, taste, nutritional value, or any other qualities claimed by the manufacturer’. In my case, there were no promises on the package from the butcher regarding the chicken. It was just bad luck, really. Two different chickens, perhaps one packaged a day earlier, but with the same best before date.
In addition to best before dates, producers have to include a ‘packaged on’ date as well. This additional date is intended to communicate to the consumer the period between the packaging date and the best before date for when that particular food item is supposed to be fresh, and available for safe consumption. Again, when we’re talking about raw food of any kind, it’s not an exact science; restaurants and food processors have to adhere to additional food handling protocols regarding the fresh food they prepare. It’s the same for consumers in the home. As unpleasant as it might seem, your nose tends to be a pretty good verification system about the freshness of a particular food item. And consumers are encouraged to ensure that work surfaces and tools are kept clean, particularly when handling raw meat and fish of any kind. I haven’t poisoned anyone yet with any of my cooking (knock on wood), but I remain vigilant.
There is an important weakness in our food system and that is education. People were caught off guard with the pandemic and suddenly, millions of us had to relearn just what to do with the food we had, and what to buy for future meals. Not only did home cooking explode, but also, inquiries of all kinds came from people desperate to find new and innovative ways to prepare food and waste less. The podcast ‘Home Cooking’, developed by Samin Nosrat and Hrishikesh Hirway, was started as a way to help home cooks figure out what to do with the food in their pantries that they hadn’t looked at in months. Sales of kitchen appliances increased dramatically, and cookbook sales in the US increased 17% over 2019 figures. And the top titles tell the story — ‘Modern Comfort Food’ and ‘The Happy in a Hurry Cookbook’ — show that people wanted both the comfort food they used to get in going out to restaurants and the convenience of cooking something up quickly given that they had three meals a day to worry about.
The gaping hole in the education question is schools. I am of a generation that still remembers the ‘home economics’ classes that were offered to girls as a means to educate them on how to be a better housewife. I cringe at the thought now, but at least, there was an effort to show what could be done with food, and to educate kids about food. Today? Both my adult children went through both the primary and secondary school systems in Quebec. Neither one of them had any course on food, food literacy, food systems, or any other topic related to food. It was, and remains, a complete desert for kids. So, unless they have engaged parents who like to cook and pass that knowledge on to their ids, they learn through the food they buy, and when they’re school-aged children, what they buy tends to be fast food. Take a drive, or bike, in the vicinity of any high school. Fast food chains abound. Not a great education after all.
There are plenty of organizations advocating for the implementation not just of actual courses about food, but integrating that with the offering of real food items in schools, so that students from poorer families can get access to nutritious food at least once during the day. So far, those organizations’ message seems to be falling on deaf ears. Food just isn’t considered a priority to be included within the education system as it once was. In Quebec’s secondary curriculum, for example, the ‘health and well-being’ part of the Physical Education and Health stream is as close as one gets to looking at the issue of lifestyle habits, which could include the food choices one makes. But food isn’t mentioned in the curriculum guide and it seems to me that healthy life habits include the food we eat.
There are some avenues to help solve the food waste beast.
Dedicated organic waste management is one of them. In Quebec, we’ve managed to reduce the amount of food items in regular garbage through dedicated brown bin programmes, but there’s still a ways to go: the latest data still show that about 57% of organic waste is ending up in landfill.
Foodhero and Flashfood are great initiatives thought up by the private sector to link consumers to food via smartphone applications, with the active cooperation of the major grocery chains.
Those grocery chains themselves are working to find ways to reduce or eliminate the food wasted through their stores.
And community organizations — Second Harvest is an example of one of the largest in the country — are bridging the gap between available food and community organizations serving low income Canadians who are finding accessing affordable food at challenge.
However, we need to do more with our kids. The amount of advertising they are subjected to by food conglomerates from an early age right through to their teen years is staggering. Think of Tony the Tiger, or Ronald McDonald, and you get the picture. Millions of dollars thrown into ads to hawk cheap, sugary, nutritionally doubtful ‘cereals’ and other foods at an audience that watches more video programming on a daily basis than sitting in school.
At the very least, offering some counter-balancing education on food, food systems, and the nutritional value of certain foods would go a long way in helping those kids as adults make better food choices, and eat better in the process.
