Reducing Food Waste

Do you throw food away? How often? Why?

Here’s a startling fact: according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, about one third of food produced globally goes to waste. That’s one in three loaves of bread. Whether it’s buying more food than we need or forgetting what’s in the freezer, we could all do a little better. Plus, according to Project Drawdown, reducing food waste ranks third in the potential solutions to reduce carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions. If global food waste were a country it would be the 3rd largest emitter of greenhouse gases!

Project Drawdown defines reduced food waste as: minimizing food loss and wastage from all stages of production, distribution, retail, and consumption.

Project Drawdown continues: “Estimates suggest that 30–40 percent of all food produced worldwide is wasted across the supply chain (Smith, P. et al., 2014). When food is wasted, all the energy, resources, and money that went into producing, processing, packaging, and transporting it are wasted too. The further down the supply chain the food gets before it is thrown out, the more resources are wasted to get it to that stage. If measures are taken to reduce food waste by improving storage and transport systems, generating public awareness, and changing consumer behavior, this solution could lead to substantial reductions in waste and carbon emissions.”

So what do I personally do to reduce my own food waste?

Shop & cook smarter

I try to go to the grocery store once a week with a shopping list. I create the shopping list after I have planned my meals for the upcoming week. I also don’t go to the grocery store on an empty stomach. All of this helps me to avoid impulse purchases. Also, I don’t often purchase in bulk — it’s not a bargain if it eventually ends up in the trash!

In my research for this post, I came across a website that helps to plan portions lovefoodhatewaste.com so I won’t cook too much. I think I’ll try this! There’s also an online cookbook Amazing Waste by science students from University of Wisconsin-Madison that contains 50 recipes for using up scraps. At the week’s end, especially in the winter months, I make a stew or a soup from whatever’s left in the refrigerator and freeze portions for next week’s dinners.

Try physically smaller plates. A Danish survey showed that if the plate size is reduced by just 9%, the food waste can be reduced by over 25%. Further justification for smaller plates: American researcher Brian Wansink found that we don’t even notice when we eat portions that are 20% smaller. Meanwhile, we tend to like our plates to be fairly full. By reducing the size of the plate, you ensure that you don’t overfeed yourself or the trash bin.

Understand date labels

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLPC), date labeling emerged in the mid-20th century when Americans began to move from rural to urban communities. Away from their food source and increasingly reliant on grocery stores, people lost their ability to judge the freshness of food and began to demand standards and verification.

So, date labels were put in place to ensure peak freshness and quality. The problem is, there’s no standardized date labeling system in the U.S. Additionally, and perhaps surprisingly, purchasing past the sell-by, use-by and best-by labels does not pose a threat to safe consumption. Use your nose: if food still smells okay, it’s likely still edible. Please exercise your own discretion when deciding what’s good to eat!

While date labels are not currently federally regulated, bipartisan leadership has led Representative Chellie Pingree (D-ME) and Representative Dan Newhouse (R-WA) to introduce the Food Date Labeling Act (H.R. 3981) to Congress on August 1, 2019. The new bill aims to standardize date labels across the United States to tackle the complex system of sell by, use by, and best before dates.

“Food labeling is important for consumer education, but the current practice is confusing and outdated,” says Rep. Newhouse. While many consumers use date labels as a reference of food safety, most dates only indicate the peak quality of a product. This not only leads to confusion, but to millions of tons of food unnecessarily thrown out. “This bill takes a step toward reducing food waste by helping consumers understand the meaning behind date labels,” states Rep. Newhouse.

Buy imperfect produce

Sixteen percent, or about 10 million tons, of produce is wasted in farms due to strict specifications such as the need for produce to be a certain size, shape, color, etc. Produce that bypass such specifications and make it to retail are often then overlooked by the consumers. My local grocery store often has a shelf of imperfect produce, that’s sometimes also past the best-by date. Not only am I able to embrace the imperfect produce to keep it from being tossed, it’s also significantly cheaper!

Store better

Did you know keeping flour in the freezer extends its life? Or that a slice of brown bread can re-soften hardened sugar? Or that shaking water from fresh produce slows degradation? Find tips on storing, preserving, freezing and much more at savethefood.com.

Think before you toss

I was fortunate to grow up in a family that didn’t throw food waste into the trash, and instead always put the food scraps onto the compost pile. Often, we created really nice, rich soil that we could put on our vegetable gardens. So composting comes naturally to me, and I definitely feel disappointed when I visit places that don’t offer composting.

If you’re a Vermont resident, by law, you’ll literally have to “think before you toss” by July 1, 2020. What am I referring to? One aspect of Vermont’s Universal Recycling Law bans food waste from disposal in trash and landfills beginning on July 1, 2020. The Vermont Legislature unanimously passed the Universal Recycling law (Act 148) in 2012 in response to the state’s stagnant recycling rates that had hovered around 30-36% for nearly two decades. Almost half of Vermonter’s trash is recyclable or compostable material like clean paper and food scraps. Landfilling these valuable natural resources not only wastes them, but also releases many more greenhouse gas emissions than reuse, recycling, food donation, and composting. A January 2019 status report said the law was working: in 2017, Vermont composting facilities collected more food scraps than ever before—a 9% increase from 2016, and over 100 transfer stations now provide food scrap drop-off for customers. Since I rent an apartment, I take advantage of my local transfer station, the Northeast Kingdom Waste Management District, which has two garbage-bin-sized containers for food scraps at their Lyndonville location. I bring my covered bucket of compost to the transfer station (along with my recyclables), dump the compost into one of the bins, and then cover it with a layer of provided sawdust. The sawdust not only helps to cut down on the smell of the good garbage, it’s absorptive, and adds beneficial carbon back into the compost.

What if your state or municipality doesn’t require or offer composting? Consider investing in a home composting bin, or even a wormery, and watch your scraps turn to rich, garden- (or plant pot-) ready compost in weeks. Coffee grounds, eggshells and citrus peel can go straight onto your garden providing mulch, aerating soil and keeping slugs at bay. See edenproject.com for more info on composting. Cities that don’t offer curbside composting pick-up can provide grants or free systems, which should pay for themselves within three to five years through reduced collection costs and tipping fees.

Project Drawdown concludes: “Reducing food loss and waste can also help close the over 60 percent gap between food available today and food needed in 2050, thereby working toward eliminating hunger. Although solutions at consumer level are difficult to implement and hard to measure, they must be pursued at regions with high levels of consumer food waste. Food loss and waste measurement tools must be developed to standardize the measurement and reporting. Food waste reduction targets should be set not only at country levels, but also broken down to corporate, supplier, and consumer levels. Incentives for waste reduction should be designed and provided to influence behavior change. Reducing food waste is a big physical problem. But it has widespread benefits for the economy, the environment, society, and human health.”

What are you doing to reduce your own food waste? How are you getting your family and friends involved?