If food waste was a country

[canetoad]

I keep thinking about a pear, the lovely green one that I bought at my local fruit shop two weeks ago and put in the fridge with mandarins and some grapes. A week later, it was still there, so I moved it to the benchtop fruit bowl, hoping that visibility would equal edibility: one of the kids would see it, eat it and compost the core. Often that works, but this time it didn’t. Day turned to night then to day and the pear stayed put. Tidy green turned to spotty yellow. The stalk listed. One pert pear bum-cheek subsided into the base of the fruit bowl, then split like a bedsore. Nicks appeared by the neck – an incident with a banana?

I should cook that, put it in a cake, stew it to serve with muesli, I thought in passing. And then I didn’t. As I write this, I have got as far as taking it out of the fruit bowl to sit on the bench, a solo sentinel of profligacy, bad planning, inept parenting, lazy housekeeping, society on the verge of climate collapse. It’s there now, just a pear, but also part of a big problem.

If food waste was a country, it would be the third-biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions after the US and China, according to the UN’s Food Waste Index Report, released last year. When foods like my pear end up in landfill, they slowly rot, generating methane and carbon dioxide.

One problem with calculating the scale of the problem is the lack of accurate data and agreed definitions on what counts as waste from the vast majority of the world. The UN estimates that 17 per cent of global food production was wasted pre-pandemic, tallying to almost one billion tonnes a year. Australia is an outsized contributor, producing 7.6 million tonnes of food waste per year, the equivalent of 312 kilograms per person, according to a waste strategy paper released by Food Innovation Australia. Approximately 70 per cent of this is edible – this at a time when one in six Australian adults struggled to access enough to eat in the past 12 months.

https://www.theage.com.au/national/our-yearly-leftovers-would-fill-the-mcg-10-times-over-the-new-plans-for-food-waste-20220318-p5a5vn.html

[MissB]

1. Lots of interesting solutions there

I’ve always thought that food waste at home is where we fight but it’s good to see folks really try to tackle the issue closer to the distribution point.

I don’t try to use melon peels or stems from herbs. I have chickens; they get a lot of things like that. I also do Bokashi, so I take care of everything but bones. Bokashi goes into my big compost bins when it’s ready- heats up the pile and makes finished compost faster.

Many of my recent efforts include trying to grow more here so that I don’t have to buy stuff, but that’s obviously not entirely possible to avoid.

I grow so many herbs that the stems are kinda “meh” for me. I just processed some parsley that was ready to be harvested. Started the plant from seed last year, used it all summer and part of the winter and it is trying to finish its life cycle. So I washed it, dried it a bit and clipped it mostly from the stems, throwing the leaves in the dehydrator. Stems went into the hens bucket with some more destined for the Bokashi bucket. Could I dry them? Freeze them? Yes, but I don’t need the stems. Technically that’s food waste. But I see it as returning the nutrients back to the soil where I grew it.