Mark Dick, a GP based in Northern Ireland and a member of the Joy in Enough enabling group, continues his series on a better food system on the other side of crisis. See part one if you missed it.
“Food waste is one of the easiest environmental issues to talk about, as almost everyone can agree that it’s a bad thing,” writes Jeremy Williams at The Earthbound Report. That makes it a good place to start as we think about what a better food system might look like.
Why is there so much agreement on food waste? Because it’s also a waste of money, at a time when household budgets are under pressure. It’s an uncontroversial area to focus on because there are so many benefits: reducing waste saves land and water and improves food security. It also lowers emissions. If food loss and waste were its own country, it would be the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter behind China and the USA.
These emissions come from the vast quantities of food that ends up rotting in landfill, but behind them are all the emissions that went into the food that went uneaten. That includes the emissions from livestock, the energy and fertilizer used on the farm, and then the energy for processing and transporting the food. Any energy used to store the food will add to that emissions bill, along with energy for cooking. Altogether that’s 4.4 gigatonnes of emissions every year, 8% of the global total.
A group of agencies produced the Food Loss and Food Waste Protocol as a way of standardizing how we measure food waste – a key first step to understanding the problem at the international level. Rightly so. A third of the food produced in the world currently goes uneaten, possibly more. In developed countries it tends to go to waste, while developing countries suffer more from food loss.
There’s a difference between these two categories. Food waste is uneaten food thrown away deliberately at the household or retail level. Food loss refers to the accidental spoiling of food through poor storage or transport. As you might expect, there’s a divide here between high- and low-income countries. In North America 61% of wasted food is by consumers, and 23% in production and handling. That’s reversed in India, where 69% is lost in production and just 13% of overall food waste is from consumers.
Those losses come from lack of storage facilities, pests or extreme weather, or poor transport and shipping infrastructure, and it really adds up. India loses 21 million tonnes of wheat every year. 40% of all fruits and vegetables grown are lost between the farm and the plate.
That creates an opportunity for relatively simple interventions to prevent loss: basics such as better roads, crates for shipping, and cold storage for prolonging the life of fresh foods on their way to market. That’s especially important in a warmer climate, and a nice example comes from the Indian company EcoZen. They build refrigerated containers that are powered by the solar panels on the roof. They can be delivered off the back of a lorry and because they work off-grid, they can be used even in remote locations. They can be placed close to harvests and moved when necessary, making cold storage accessible to farmers and cooperatives who could not afford it before. That puts more money in farmers pockets as well as reducing waste.
- Stay tuned for more on a sustainable food system, as we go on to look at meat, rewilding and more.
- Feature image by Thomas Gamstaetter/Unsplash
Joy in Enough 