Intentional Living

Food Waste

/October 2, 2014/ Comments Off

“Hunger never saw bad bread.” – Benjamin Franklin

 

At the beginning of 2014, my husband Alan and I made a conscious effort to trim the food that ends up in our trash. We aren’t big food wasters to begin with, but we always feel guilty when we throw out any food, however infrequently. As most of us recognize, throwing out food is not only a colossal waste of money and resources, but is also an affront to those who struggle with hunger, malnutrition, or worse – starvation.

No sooner did we renew this commitment, than did I come across several shocking facts about food waste from an Edmonton Journal article dated January 18, 2014. Here are a few of those facts:

  • More than $1,000 a year of food waste is thrown in the kitchen trash yearly per Canadian family – it’s a major contributor, via landfill, to the production of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane.
  • Statistics Canada estimates that about 40% all the food we produce in Canada goes to waste, to the tune of $27 billion a year – that’s more than the value of all the food purchased by Canadians in restaurants in 2009.
  • The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that, globally, one third of food produced to feed people is lost as it moves from field to plate. In Canada, the value of the food waste is greater than the combined Gross Domestic Product of the 32 poorest countries in the world, according to the World Bank.
  • In Canada, 51% of food waste is generated in the home – not from spoilage in grocery stores, excess production at food processors or in restaurants, or careless handling by farmers and food industry truckers.

To further our efforts to reduce food waste, we’ve become religious about things that we’ve always done to some degree – meal planning (based on weekly flyer specials); shopping for groceries only once a week; buying only what we need; embracing leftovers (for other meals or for the freezer, no matter how small the portion); and having end-of-the-month “variety night” meals which are comprised of odds and ends from the fridge and freezer.

To help keep us accountable and to make the food waste quantifiable, we maintained a list of all the food items we threw out. Our list included the following: ½ red pepper, ¼ green pepper, ½ onion, 4 peaches, 1 pint of strawberries, ½ bundle of cilantro, 1 cup of cooked stir fry, 1 boiled potato, ¾ bundle of parsley, a dozen grapes, 4 slices of bread and 1 tub of ranch dip. Not zero waste by any means, but a definitely a baseline for us to improve upon next year!

Waste Reduction Week in Canada takes place in October. Consider food waste as part of your overall waste reduction. For helpful resources on food waste, click on the following links:

There are also several documentaries on this topic, including Dive!, Taste the Waste, and Just Eat It.

food food waste