The Conundrum of Food Waste

Author: Emma Bryce

Bryce, Emma. “The Conundrum of Food Waste.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 25 Jan. 2013, green.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/the-conundrum-of-food-waste/?searchResultPosition=2.

Each year, 1.3 billion tons of food — about one-third of all the food produced globally –- ends up wasted even as hundreds of millions of people go hungry. This week, two United Nations agencies opened a global campaign to address that conundrum, calling for changes in the way that food is harvested, transported, processed, sold, and consumed.

The Think, Eat, Save initiative, organized by the United Nations Environment Program and the Food and Agriculture Organization with partners, underlines the disparities between food production and consumption patterns in developed and developing countries.

Robert van Otterdijk, the team leader for the F.A.O.’s Save Food program, said that a 2011 study by his group found that just a quarter of the food lost annually would suffice to feed the world’s hungry.

“The biggest major finding was the striking difference between food waste and food losses in different parts of the word,” he said. Developing regions tend to suffer food losses in the production process through poor harvesting techniques, spoilage, or improper storage, for example — what Mr. van Otterdijk calls “unintentional” loss.

Industrialized nations in the Americas, Europe, and prosperous parts of Asia waste food at the retail and consumer end, embracing policies that favor glossy round apples and discard knobbly ones, for example, and set needlessly short limits on the shelf life of many products.

“And then you have, of course, the consumers that don’t plan their shopping well,” overestimating how much they may need and tossing much of it out later — largely because they can afford to do so and suffer no consequences, Mr. van Otterdijk said.

Yet James Lomax, an agri-food program officer for the United Nations Environment Program, said that this divide was beginning to blur a bit as the middle class expands in developing countries. Kenya, for instance, is “an example of a country that is suffering from a lot of poverty, but has issues with food waste,” he said.

Europe and the United States nonetheless continue to generate the most food waste. The phenomenon in Europe is roughly parallel to that in the United States, countering the notion that Americans are far more improvident. “We Europeans know how to waste,” Mr. van Otterdijk noted dryly.

The loss or waste of food tends to drive up food prices in developing nations. Then there’s the squandered water, energy, and land, the accumulation of discarded packaging, and the pointless discharge of greenhouse gases in the production or disposal process. The biggest emissions threat of all may be the wasted food that ends up in landfills, generating enormous amounts of methane gas that escape and contribute to climate change.

Globally, Save Food’s research shows that almost half of all harvested fruits, vegetables, and roots and tubers are lost or wasted and left to rot in landfills, largely because of their perishable nature and public squeamishness over-consuming food after its sell-by date.

Next are seafood and cereals, with annual losses of around 30 percent.

Twenty percent of meat and dairy products are lost each year, a category that generally consumes the most water, animal feed, and space, as well as energy in the transportation and processing stages.

Yet in a globalized industry, a single tomato can pose a similar environmental concern. “It’s criminal to throw away a tomato if it has been grown in a hothouse in Holland in the winter,” Mr. Lomax said.

The Think, Eat, Save program’s organizers are still drafting action plans for different countries and regions. “When you talk about food losses at the agro-processing or storage level, then you mainly talk about technical solutions,” Mr. van Otterdijk said, “If you talk however about food waste, then you talk about changing people’s mindsets.”

Efforts will include campaigns to heighten consumer awareness, push for less packaging, and to question sell-by dates that seem overly restrictive.

Mr. Lomax suggests that reducing food waste while challenging, is one of the more world’s more attainable goals. “It’s a top priority for many people now,” he said. “It’s one of the simpler things – not simple, but simpler to tackle.”

DMU Timestamp: February 27, 2021 01:26

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