Why you Should Know about International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste: 29th September
September 29th is the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste. To celebrate this special day, wouldn’t it be nice if everybody decided to waste no food at all? The fact is that we constantly throw things away, especially food. According to the Guardian, a third of the food production is wasted. A third!! When you know that about 11% of the world population are starving, this is outraging.
In the UK, households waste around 4.5 million tons of food per year. How come we waste so much food? Mainly because we buy more than we consume.
My personal experience
I generally try to be aware of that when I go to the supermarket, and I make an effort to buy only what I need. Personal tip: I use a basket instead of a shopping trolley. When it’s getting too heavy, I stop shopping and go to the checkout.
Back home, my biggest problem is that I often put something in the fridge and the next day I have completely forgotten about it. It is sometimes weeks later that I finally notice it. Can I still eat it? My first reaction is to look at the Use By Date. Oh no, it has expired! Shall I throw it away? Maybe not.
UBDs are often set earlier than necessary by producers who do not want to take any risk and are complying with governmental rules. Even on products that don’t expire at all, like honey, dried fruit, powdered milk, and so on, you can find some sort of expiration dates too, the Best Before Dates. As cautious consumers, we may end up throwing away products which are still edible.
I think using our natural five senses instead of following blindly these dates is definitely the best thing to do. So, I look at my product, smell it and taste a little piece of it. Nothing strange. I start cooking.
If like me you’re a single woman, cooking for only one person is hard and I don’t particularly enjoy eating leftovers for three days in a row. To avoid throwing meals away, I freeze everything. Did you know that you can even freeze eggs, milk, and cheese? The bbc good food website lists all the ingredients that can safely be frozen and gives useful tips.
The importance of buying local and seasonal products
Food importation from around the world generates a lot of waste. I couldn’t find an exact figure, but you can easily imagine that the shorter the distribution chain is, the less food is wasted. Plus, the more local you buy your fruit and veggies, the fresher, more nutritious and tastier they are. And you are supporting local farms.
Lots of them as well as no-waste shops also sell products that are not calibrated and discarded by some channels of distribution: they are cheaper and just as good.
They also offer “veggie boxes”, a box with local, fresh, seasonal, and possibly organic veggies and fruit. Every two weeks, I get mine at my local no-waste shop with a variety of veggies, some that I’ve never seen nor cooked before. It pushes me to be more creative when I cook, and I love it.
Buying local food is not only good for you but it is also good for the planet. You are lowering your carbon footprint: less miles, less carbon dioxide emissions.
Even restaurants are now making efforts to address climate change. In the UK, some of them introduced the “One Planet Plate” on their menu: a dish with less meat or no meat at all, made with local food and wasting no food at all. Isn’t it a great initiative? You can find all the restaurants participating in the project on the One Planet Plate website.
Impacts of food waste on the planet
Why is wasting food contributing to the increase in our carbon footprint? you’ll ask. Well, when food degrades it releases methane. We usually hear about methane release when talking about livestocks. But food waste does contribute to 16% of total methane release (as opposed to 27% for livestocks).
Methane is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide. That means that 1 kg of methane released into the atmosphere is equivalent to a release of 84 kg of carbon dioxide. So, by limiting our food waste, we participate in the fight against climate change.
So for that day, why shouldn’t we avoid buying exotic and off-season products, cook whatever we have in our fridge, experiment new recipes, freeze our leftovers or give them to somebody? And why shouldn’t we keep doing that all the year round?