Every year, around 1/3 of the world’s food is either lost or wasted. This is about 1.3 billion tonnes- more than the weight of Mount Everest! Shockingly, it contributes towards 8-10% of global greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity.
But what is food loss and waste? Where, why and how does it occur? In this blog, Part Two of our series celebrating the FAO’s International Year of Fruits and Vegetables (IYFV), we will be looking at the issues of food loss and waste, how it is linked to food poverty and how you can get involved in playing an active role in reducing food waste at FEAST With Us
What is food loss and waste?
Hearing about the issue of food waste is very common, but when we talk about the huge quantities of food that never make it to our plates, food waste only covers part of the story. The rest is due to food loss: the decrease in food quality and quantity from actions by food suppliers. In other words, food loss happens at the farm level, during storage, transport and in packaging factories, all of this before it even gets to the supermarkets.
Food waste, on the other hand, refers to all food that goes to waste from the supermarkets, hospitality industry and in consumer households. Frequently, the cause of this waste is perfectly edible food that is thrown away unnecessarily, before or after being purchased, prepared and served. When it reaches the supermarket, fresh produce is often rejected for failing to meet specific aesthetic standards set by retailers. In Europe, one third of fruit and veg never reaches supermarket shelves for being deemed “too ugly to sell”
French supermarket chain Intermarché took on the fight against food waste in 2014 with their ‘Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables’ campaign
Another common cause of food waste is a result of confusion over date labels on food, particularly “best-before” dates. Food that is close to, at or beyond its “best-before” date is often discarded by consumers, despite the label simply indicating peak quality, whereas ‘use by’ dates are an indicator of food safety. Retailers also throw out perfectly edible items that display a “sell-by” or “display until” date on them, helping them manage their stock but which have nothing to do with the safety of consuming the food past these dates.
Even if it does make it to our homes, a large proportion often ends up in the bin! In the UK, 1.2 million tomatoes and 1.4 million bananas are thrown away every day. One of the biggest causes of this, is that we tend to over-buy and end up with food that goes off before we have a chance to use it.
Did you know, households are the biggest producers of food waste in the UK, producing a whopping 70% of the country’s total wasted food?
Why fruits and vegetables?
Fruits and vegetables are highly perishable products. This means they are likely to decay or go bad quickly, which can cause high levels of food loss and waste. Because of this, and due to poor storage, transit and processing, up to 50 percent of fruits and vegetables produced in developing countries are lost in the supply chain between harvest and consumption.
This loss of food has huge environmental impacts and many hidden ones such as the waste of the resources used to grow our food. For example, producing just one orange can use up to 50 litres of water!
Food that never gets eaten means a waste of land, water, energy and soil and produces large quantities of greenhouse gas emissions at the same time. Reducing our food waste is key therefore to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and alleviating pressure on precious natural resources.
What does food loss and waste have to do with food poverty?
Globally, around 820 million people are undernourished, yet 1 billion people are overfed. While some areas of the world face limited availability and access to fresh fruit and vegetables, other areas produce and consume much more than they need. This huge imbalance is exacerbated as the world’s population continues to grow, not to mention the wide-reaching impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet food poverty is not just about access to the right quantity of food, but also the right quality of food necessary for a healthy diet. This is where FEAST With Us comes in. By preventing and reducing food loss up the supply chain, redistributing food rejected by retailers and cooking it into nutritious meals, we can help address both food waste and challenges in access to healthy food.
What are we doing about food waste at FEAST With Us?
“At FEAST With Us, we like to cook up all the surplus we are given, because there is goodness in all of it!”, says FEAST With Us founder and NHS dietitian Hannah Style. Reducing food waste has always been one of the three main missions of the charity, alongside malnutrition prevention and community cohesion, and they all go hand in hand. By intercepting food and cooking it into nutritious meals for local vulnerable people, we are saving it from going to landfill and helping to alleviate food poverty and insecurity in the community.
Last year, we decided to take this mission to reduce food waste even further by embarking on our Zero Food Waste FEAST project, supported by the North London Waste Authority, to prevent and reduce food waste across our operations. As part of this project, we are partnering with local schools, shelters and community gardens to raise awareness of food waste and come up with innovative closed-loop solutions, such as encouraging food to be grown locally in an urban setting and installing composters and wormeries for the unavoidable food waste produced in our cooking sessions.
How can you help make a difference?
If you would like to help us on our mission, then look no further! At the end of 2020, we introduced an exciting new cooking volunteer role: the Food Waste Champion. Our dedicated Food Waste Champions are passionate about cooking sustainably and reducing waste. They are responsible for encouraging our volunteers to think and cook in a more sustainable way, as well as taking the lead on managing donations to prevent food loss and waste in FEAST With Us kitchens.
If you would like to help us on our mission, then look no further! At the end of 2020, we introduced an exciting new cooking volunteer role: the Food Waste Champion. Our dedicated Food Waste Champions are passionate about cooking sustainably and reducing waste. They are responsible for encouraging our volunteers to think and cook in a more sustainable way, as well as taking the lead on managing donations to prevent food loss and waste in FEAST With Us kitchens.
Click the button below to register your interest in becoming a Food Waste Champion.
WRAP Food Waste Action Week 2021
It is clear that food loss and waste are causes of urgent environmental, social and economic issues. Luckily, a huge amount of food waste comes down to our individual actions as consumers, which means there is a lot we can do to make a difference, whether that be volunteering at FEAST With Us or setting out to reduce waste in your own home.
Next week is the first ever Food Waste Action Week led by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), where food organisations will rally together to raise awareness of food waste, share knowledge and change the way we think about food. To celebrate this week, FEAST With Us will be revealing our top tips for reducing waste at home by shopping, storing and cooking more sustainably.
In the words of Marcus Gover, CEO of WRAP; “The climate crisis remains one of the biggest and most urgent challenges facing humanity. Wasted food has a significant contribution to climate change, and is something we need to address together. Join us in the Food Waste Action Week activities to make wasting food a thing of the past.”
Join in with our campaign and keep up-to-date with the work we are doing by following our social media channels.
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