“We need to harness the significance of people’s obsession with food right now, and understand how waste is sinful, criminal, as well as financially foolish.” –– Chef Mario Batali, from the documentary film, Wasted! The Story of Food Waste (2017)
Food waste has been of major global concern for many years now. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations estimates that annually, 1.3 billion tonnes of edible food – equivalent to a third of global production – which would be enough to feed three billion people, is wasted.
This is particularly appalling when one considers that every day, people go hungry. In fact, according to the UN’s World Food Programme “2021 is going to be a bad year for world hunger”. It estimates that 957 million people across 93 countries do not have enough to eat and 239 million people will be in need of life-saving humanitarian action and protection this year. Ending food waste would certainly solve this problem, but unfortunately, it is not as straightforward as that.
In navigating food waste and why it persists, one must take human capriciousness into account. A tremendous amount of agricultural produce goes to waste as a result of ridiculous quality standards that overemphasize colour, shape and uniformity in appearance especially with regard to fruits and vegetables.
After observing shopping trends and conducting market research, supermarkets, particularly in the developed world, began to demand that suppliers provide food that was homogenous, aesthetically pleasing and had a longer shelf life. Fresh produce that deviated from what was considered optimal, in terms of colour, shape and size, began to be removed from the supply chain during sorting operations. This has been the norm for decades and it has even crept into farmers’ markets with so-called discerning customers rejecting oddly-shaped, or fully-ripe fruit and vegetables.
The result was that farmers worked with agricultural scientists to focus on the appearance and volume of their products and because they also needed to contend with pests that could wipe out crops, organic farming was placed on the backburner.
It can be surmised then that the food crops grown and eaten by our ancestors obviously bore little resemblance in either appearance or taste to that which goes by the same name today. According to a study published last year in the journal Nature, thousands of years ago humans living in what is now northern Bolivia cultivated squash, cassava and maize. Based on fragments of silica they found in Amazonia, researchers were able to identify evidence of cassava grown 10,350 years ago, squash 10,250 years ago, and maize 6,850 years ago. There was also evidence of sweet potato and peanuts. These crops have been changed dramatically over the last few decades or so to comply with unnecessary standards of consistency.
Food is also wasted when fresh or processed produce that is close to or at the best-before or expiry date as mandated by governments in many developed countries, is discarded by retailers and consumers. And this is often a result of poor supply chain management on the macro side of things and the chronic overshopping which is ordinarily rampant in western households.
Another way in which wastage occurs is when wholesome edible food remains unused or left over and is discarded from household kitchens and eating establishments. How many of us know of, or is, that person who scorns leftovers and insists on freshly-prepared meals three times a day on a daily basis? Then there are eating establishments, particularly in North America, that prefer to throw out unused and untouched food rather than allow their employees to consume it or give it to the homeless.
Given its complexity, reducing and ending food waste requires a holistic approach, but it must be addressed as it is critical to creating the zero-hunger world most, if not all of us, aspire to. In so doing, we would meet the second Sustainable Development Goal which is to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.
With that said, and notably in the face of the last aim of that goal, an article published by the BBC on Monday last about farmers and scientists engineering flavourful food proved to be entirely discombobulating. The article related that farmers and scientists are working to reintroduce flavour to fruits and vegetables that had previously been grown for shelf-life and uniformity, like tomatoes, beets and kale, in what is clearly yet another sign of pandering to human vacillation.
It might seem petty to appear to begrudge the time being spent on what must be important research, because who does not want tasty fruits and vegetables. But one hopes this proves to be an aberration and that what farmers and scientists are really devoting time to is climate (especially flood) resistant crops which are not genetically modified. The signs are everywhere that food security must be of paramount importance in the coming years for the world as we know it to survive. We continue to ignore these signs at our peril.
