Who hasn’t felt guilty throwing leftovers in the trash? Definitely me. I joined Food in Community, a Devon nonprofit for food waste as a volunteer in 2015, so I had six years to hone my home food waste reduction strategy, but food short term will still deteriorate before you can use them when short of time. In the compost heap goes. We humans are hardwired into our disgust for waste. So where are we going wrong?
Greenhouse gases emitted from food waste are greater than the total emissions of any country in the world besides China and the US The emissions associated with the food we throw away in the UK are more than the total emissions of greenhouse gases for Kenya. As Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) summed up: “Making a dent in food loss and waste will slow climate change …”
But how? Eating the food we produce will help ensure that the resources to produce, package, store and transport it, including fossil fuels, water, land, seeds, labor, money and time, are invested in sustenance. of people, the nutrients that provide energy for life and health. If that food goes to waste, resources are wasted and more resources will be needed to replace it. It sounds obvious, but the environmental footprint of food waste is very much the carbon footprint of food. So decarbonizing our food system and our diets is vital.
If we need to eat more plant-based foods for the environment and for our health, it makes sense that we eat as much of what is grown as possible. Fruits and vegetables represent the world’s largest volume of food waste, up to 60%, so the interventions have a potential impact. However, strategies for collecting and using food that would otherwise go to waste must be carefully designed, ideally with farmers and grassroots experts in the agroecological sphere.
When food already has a low carbon footprint, transporting it can account for 50 percent of your carbon footprint, so distribution strategies need to be more than just replacing diesel with electric vehicles. In particular, if the product has a short shelf life, it must be used quickly and this usually means locally where robust networks are vital.
So how do we move forward on food waste after COP26? I can’t help but go back to Guy Singh-Watson’s analysis, that “… taxes on carbon (or directly on fossil fuels) offer the only realistic path.”
There is no doubt that we must make better use of the food we produce and deal with surpluses more consciously, but one step before that, we must support agroecological food produced with a low input of fossil fuels. I will still be preparing the dinner plates from the ‘bottom of the fridge’ with the leftovers and ends. Individual efforts still matter, but some of the problems behind food waste are structural.