(Caveat: these percentages are my amateur estimates; I’m sure there are studies with more precise figures) There has been discussions regarding reducing Food Waste, but I have my doubts that will happen. We live in a consumer-based economic system, and I don’t see a viable solution. I estimate that Food Waste comes 60 % from restaurants, 10-20% from grocery stores, and 10% from consumers.
When it comes to restaurants, I assume they have a good projection as to what their demand is going to be (40-50 people at lunch, say) and make their meal purchases accordingly. So at end of day, they should have little leftovers, and small volume at that. A pot of , say, chicken noodle soup is only enough to feed maybe 10 persons, so it wouldn’t help a community meal provider, who serves anywhere from 40-80 people to make the trip if they’re open that day. So soup gets tossed. Then add all the other meal ingredients, unless there’s enough to recycle the next day. Hence all the wasted food.
Grocery stores have some perfectly-good produce with some “blemish” that shoppers will not buy for that reason; hopefully they can donate them to local food banks or community meals. I know grocers donate some products. And goods with “use by/best by” may get bought at ‘discount section’. But unbought will be disposed of.
Consumers are risk-averse, so they will throw away “use by/best by” even though articles say they’re still good. I know there are composters who utilize leftovers/etc. but effects are negligible.
In short, I don’t see any way to lessen Food Waste with the amount of one-off use. Any suggestions?
There’s an app called Too Good To Go that is supposed to address the restaurant end of day waste thing - where you can grab a bag of random leftovers at a bargain price, from a restaurant right when they are clearing up before closing.
In theory, this could help as it might join the dots between hungry people with not much money and restaurants with a surplus of food that will be wasted… But…
It seems that it generates a lot of short journey travel for small amounts of food, plus also it seems, especially in big cities, restaurants are cooking extra food just so they can sell it through this app.
Restaurants waste an enormous amount of food. Don’t believe me? Go out back and check one of their numerous dumpsters.I worked in a restaurant, and while we had a rough idea of how many people should normally show up for lunch, on any given day it could be way more than we expected, or way less. Usually it was way less. All you have are averages, and they aren’t that great at predicting expected volumes on any given day. You could switch to a 100% “made to order” format, and that would cut down on waste, but it would take much longer for the food to arrive and the customers wouldn’t like that. If you only sell a few items, that’s different, but most restaurants have a large menu and have to prepare a lot of different foods in advance, which means waste is inevitable. I’m not saying waste can’t be reduced, but I don’t think it’s a one-size-fits all problem.
Reducing food waste at the consumer end is not impossible. Cooking from scratch and producing very little waste is quite feasible.
I hope this isn’t a hijack, but maybe as a thought experiment just to tease out some embryonic ideas: let’s say aliens landed in the government square of every nation and told us that food waste was their biggest ick, and if we don’t sort it out by the time they returned in six months, they will push our planet into the sun. For the sake of the thought experiment, let’s say we absolutely believe them, and that they can and will do it, so minimising food waste will be a very high priority exercise to which we would be prepared to apply commitment, resources etc.
I wonder about food waste every time I pass the butcher section at my grocery store. Do they put out only what they plan on selling that day? I doubt it, since the cases seem to be as full in the evening as in the morning. So do they just remove the meats (and fish - eek!) at night and put it out the next morning? I haven’t been brave enough to ask them what happens to the “leftovers”; I hope they don’t send it to their deli/restaurant buffet to recycle.
The amazing thing about life in the US in the current era is how cheap food (or at least calories) is. The only way food waste will be reduced is if it gets too expensive to throw away.
There is lots of potential food waste right from the farm field to plate, and Australia is no different. Modern industrialised agriculture relies on consistent handleable product to be picked, packed and transported. You may love your heirloom tomatoes that actually taste like tomatoes, but they are not good and way too squishy for the sort of handling that gives you cheap and easy tomatoes that you will find in your salads and pasta sources or on your pizza.
As consumers we also insist on good looking ‘safe’ fruit, so much is wasted getting rid of ugly tomatoes, excessively phallic cucumbers and multipedal carrots. Hopefully they are being weeded out at the farm or canning factory, because then they can at least go to the soup factory. If they are just an ugly, friendless, unsold muto turnip in the supermarket then they become part of the huge quantity of retailed vegetables that gets thrown out because no one wants to buy imperfect fruit.
There are initiatives like OzHarvest which do a lot of rescuing quantities of food and goods where that is possible.
And then there are restaurants. Already discussed, but I think chef training now includes a lot of knowledge about minimising waste, which is probably easier in some places than others. I suspect its where the buy-in / throw out margin is tightest, simply because there is a direct dollar cost for every unsold asparagus.
And home is terrible - we all waste food, either through over-buying, inappropriate storage and being too poorly informed about how to eke out value from nearly expired food. We have recently had a food waste bin system introduced. It really highlights how much of a household’s weekly refuse is wasteful food packaging and porrly managed food. Its led to some direct habit change for me.
So, yes, other industrial countries have the same problem. Non-industrial countries wish this was a problem they had.
We have so much in the US.
It is a travesty what we toss.
Any where food is served there are gonna be massive amounts wasted. A school cafeteria or hospital meal service is just awful.
One way to fix it?
People get hungry.
They would be more apt to discourage waste in their life.
If a population gets hungry, there is more motivation to stop the behavior.
Yeah, from what I have observed using the app, it works really well for saving food waste from bakeries, bagel shops and pizzerias, but for actual restaurants it’s often meals cooked directly for the app as a way to draw in customers rather than whatever is leftover.
It’s also kind of unreliable outside of dense urban areas. I tested it for a while and there were plenty of bags on offer here in semi-rural Dorset towns, but they frequently get cancelled by the store, late in the day and at that point, all the other choices are gone.
I guess that means there was no food actually going to waste on those occasions, but for a person trying to rely on the app, it means you’re going hungry.
And instead causes other problems, like people overeating even when they aren’t hungry because they’ve been taught to think of food as scarce. The whole post-Depression “always clean your plate” effect being an example. Plus it’s terrible politics and can easily kill people.
One way for consumers to influence restaurants is, I suppose, to pick places that have a ‘specials’ board. In England at least, this usually comprises dishes that the chef made from unsold covers the previous day.
I don’t mean leftovers that they scraped from post-customer plates, but for example if they offer slow cooked lamb shank on the main menu, that has to be cooked well in advance. At the end of the night, and unsold lamb shanks can’t be just kept in their existing form and reheated the next day, but the meat can be stripped off and chopped and made into shepherds pie, which can then be chilled and will stand in the fridge for several days (and reheated on order rather than advance)
Quite a lot of restaurants in England do this and you see a specials board that typically comprises pies, stews, curries, etc, and you see staff wiping choices off the specials chalkboard as they sell out. Those things are made from unsold covers.
It would work up until they can force out of power the people imposing hunger on them. It might well have the opposite effect long term, making wasting food into a point of pride and declaration of freedom.
Really, this brings up the question of just how crazy we want to go. If we go with the previously mentioned “aliens will kill Earth if we don’t reduce wastage” scenario you could end up with a scenario of panicked governments across the world becoming totalitarian states where people’s eating habits are monitored at all times, or even the large scale use of nuclear weapons to kill entire populations - exterminated people don’t waste food after all. And if it’s them or us, a lot of people will pick “us”.
On the other hand if you are trying for something that doesn’t belong in a satire or a dystopian story, you’ll be a lot more constrained by how far you can go. Something like a tax on discarded food for example would reduce wastage without requiring a food gestapo to enforce it.
I was kind of hoping that the aliens scenario might tease out some ideas that are on the face of it, outrageous, but have within them a kernel of useful idea that we just won’t get to think about if we dismiss outrageous ideas from the get-go. Approaching the problem from the other end, perhaps.
For example what if we said that restaurant customers wouldn’t be allowed to make meal choices right there at the mealtime, but would have to book and choose in advance, so the catering can be exact and less wasteful. (some places already do this for group bookings).
Of course there would be numerous objections to this becoming the mandatory norm. Some people want to see how they feel in the day. Some people want to be spontaneous about eating out, etc, but are there enough people who would be prepared to book both their table and their menu choice, days in advance? What if they got a discounted price for doing that?
That’s an interesting thought. I would be willing to do that for high end “destination” food. Not for “I’m driving from here to there and need lunch, let’s find a place to sell us food”.