A lot of food loss and waste can be avoided, especially in retail and household settings. Photo / 123rf
A lot of food loss and waste can be avoided, especially in retail and household settings. Photo / 123rf
Food waste is a serious emergency worldwide, so here are four practical steps we can take this Earth Day to eat more healthily, reduce food waste and save the planet.
While some food loss and waste — such as with eggshells, tea bags or bones — is unavoidable, a lot of it can be avoided, especially in retail and household settings.
The retail context is where about 14 per cent of avoidable food waste occurs as foods are often overstocked by grocery stores prioritising constant availability at the expense of wasted product.
In households, food is primarily wasted due to spoilage, with the greatest volume lost being perishables, especially fruits and vegetables. This last area accounts for nearly half of all food waste in Canada.
Food is primarily wasted due to spoilage, with the greatest volume lost being perishables. Photo / 123rf
In Canada, each household is estimated to throw away nearly 3kg of food that could have been eaten each week. To put that in context, it’s about 15 apples or large carrots sent to the landfill unnecessarily each week.
Food costs account on average for over 11 per cent of household income, with lower-income families having to shell out an even greater percentage of their income on food.
The average household is throwing away almost C$900 ($1111) each year and with nearly seven million Canadian households struggling to get enough food on the table — and two-in-five reporting cost as a barrier to healthy eating — that waste adds up.
Beyond money alone, food waste may also have an impact on the health of our diets. Often, it’s the nutrient-rich fruits, vegetables and perishables ending up in the bin, rather than shelf-stable ultra-processed foods which have known health consequences.
With food loss and waste occurring at every stage of the food chain, the solutions are needed at every stage as well. While food loss earlier in the chain may be harder to avoid, retailers and households hold the power to address food waste every day.
Current solutions targeting food waste include upcycling food waste, creating city compost programmes to re-route waste away from landfills, and promoting consumer awareness via education to prevent food from becoming waste in the first place.
Interventions for food waste in practice
Eager to address this global issue, our research group developed and piloted a four-week intervention in 2020 to reduce household food waste among Canadian families.
Mothers, fathers, and children were invited to participate in a four-week intervention with the following components:
1) A cooking class;
2) Four text messages per week including information about food waste and reminders to reduce waste;
3) A toolkit, which included things like a veggie brush (to reduce vegetable peel waste), a cookbook focused on reducing food waste, meal and shopping planner, reusable containers to store leftovers and a fridge magnet poster showing where foods are best stored.
The families reported high satisfaction with the overall intervention and special appreciation for the cookbook and veggie brush as tools in food-waste prevention.
Parents also reported increases in confidence to reduce household food waste. The children involved in the study also reported an improved ability to interpret best-before dates — or food that is not as fresh as it was, but still perfectly edible.
At the household level, we found a 37 per cent decrease in avoidable fruit and vegetable waste measured using four-week food waste audits where waste was collected and weighed out separately.
These results are promising in that they demonstrate that even at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic (mid-2020), families could still reduce food waste using simple tools and prompts without decreasing fruit and vegetable intake. Another promising result is that we were able to engage both parents and children, resulting in individual and household-level changes.
You can plan your meals before shopping to reduce food waste. Photo / 123rf
Tips for healthier eating and reduced food waste
Incorporating healthy food into our diets should not be too much of a chore, but busy schedules and rising grocery prices can get in the way.
Finding simple ways to reduce household food waste is crucial.
That said, responsibility for food loss and waste should not only fall on individual consumers. While individuals can make a difference, larger policy changes — in how food is grown, processed and distributed — are also needed.
If you are interested in eating healthier and helping improve our planet’s health, here are some steps you can take:
Amar Laila is a post-doctoral fellow with the EAT-Lancet 2.0 Commission and studied at University of Guelph. Cristina Gago is an assistant professor of community health sciences at Boston University School of Public Health at Boston University. Jess Haines is an associate professor of applied nutrition at the Department of Family Relations and Applied Nutrition at University of Guelph.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.
