The hidden cost of food
Navigating our relationship with food and its relationship with climate
Explain like I’m a memer
My husband and I have very different ideas about food, more like extreme ends of a spectrum.
While he’s a foodie who’s also picky about what he eats, I have been looking forward to the invention of nutritious food pills to avoid making decisions on what to eat everyday. While I tend to bend over backwards towards healthy and simple foods, he cannot imagine a life without an explosion of flavours. I eat to live, he lives to eat.
As you can imagine, food is a war-torn territory in the map of our household, where signing a peace treaty is a distant dream. Just as one needs to find a way to live with some harsh realities of life, we too had to figure out a way to optimize our grocery shopping list and food preparation to avoid food wastage. But why optimize for waste?
Food waste is a massive problem
One-third of the global food produce does not get consumed. It goes to waste.
~14% gets lost between harvest and retail - at farms, in storage, during processing & packaging and in transit from points of source & distribution to points of sale. This mainly happens owing to infrastructural and process inefficiencies / inadequacies, for example, lack of access to cold storage to farmers
~17% gets wasted in households, retail and food service1. Overconsumption, constrained shelf life of food and misjudgment in demand are key reasons for this.
For context, almost half of world’s habitable land is used for agriculture2.
So this means we use half of the land we could live on to produce food yet are only able to consume less than 70% of what’s grown on that ~50% land. Assuming the current food supply (actual consumption) is adequate for the concurrent population’s sustenance and that there were no food waste or shortages, only 35% of habitable land would need to be in agricultural use, freeing up the rest for forests and our habitation. That’s A LOT of potential to do better.
Why is food waste a problem?
By now we’ve established that, at a global level, we produce a lot more food than we consume. To be able to bring this food to life, multiple resources get invested. At a broad level, this entails
Commitment of habitable land;
Diversion of freshwater to irrigate croplands, rear livestock, process the produce and cook food; and
Consumption of fuel / energy to get produce from farm to table - irrigation, land tilling and fertilizers, temperature controlled storage, transportation and retail & post retail refrigeration.
Hence, wasted food is a waste of land, water and energy which could have been put to other productive uses.
What do you think happens to this unconsumed food? As we established for any other waste in my last post, Overconsumption is Eating The World, the majority of waste food finds its grave in landfills. There, it rots and releases methane, a GHG more potent than CO2 which traps 84x the heat trapped by CO2 over a 20 year period. You can only imagine the collective quantity of methane that gets released when one-third of food rots!
Not to forget many foods emit GHGs even when getting produced and retailed, animal-based foods topping the chart with red meat being the highest emitter.
What can you, as a consumer, do to avoid wasting food?
Given that about 17% of food produced gets wasted, individual effort in identifying and curbing this waste will create a significant collective dent in the figure. Not to forget, many people in developing nations still battle starvation. Where our privilege begins, their dreams come true.
When shopping for groceries:
Plan grocery purchases based on your established consumption patterns. Base rule - Out of sight, out of mind. Store only as much food in your pantries and refrigerators as your household needs and your eyes can see. If you can’t locate a stored item, you’ll buy more of it while its older version still awaits its turn while approaching its expiry date. Do not overstuff your refrigerators assuming the poor machine will prolong the life of your food for an indefinite period. Bulk buying of perishable food items should be avoided unless freezing them for months without deterioration in nutritive value is an option.
Shop for groceries on a satiated stomach so that you don't salivate at every item you see and are tempted to buy food you never intended to buy. Will also help save money!
Check for expiry dates to ensure your food is not cursed to death a few days into your possession especially when you don't intend to consume it immediately, for example, bread, ready to eat foods and tinned foods. Also, ‘best before’ and ‘expiry date’ are not etched in stone; many food items are safe to consume even a few days after the said dates have been crossed. However, take this suggestion with a grain of salt since this comes from personal experience.
When cooking at home:
Food leftovers have the same right to your tummy as fresh food. Thanks to refrigeration, most foods are safe to consume the next day / couple of days later. In case you don’t wish to have the same food again, offer it to someone who may be in need.
Inedible food scraps can be used for home composting and DIY bioenzymes. Composting gives natural fertilizer for the soil and bioenzymes give natural, non-toxic alternatives to effective cleaning agents. Since I haven’t begun practicing this measure myself yet, I cannot preach about it. However, from second hand conversations, I know this is not tedious (as it may sound) once you get started - it’s all about crossing that mental chasm. Checkout the detailed composting and bioenzyme guides.
Eat local and seasonal produce for it is easier to find in abundance. Having an avocado (unless you live where it grows), i.e., an imported food will increase your carbon footprint given the high GHG emissions emanating from its long haul transportation.
When eating out:
As a general rule, try eating slowly, chewing each morsel well, to feel fulfilled with lesser food. Anyway, it is recommended to eat to 80% of your capacity to maintain good health.
A la carte menus
Check for portion sizes beforehand and calibrate the order with your appetite. The USA, in general, is considered to be notorious for large portion sizes for the rest of the world. If eating out with a group, make an effort to share food instead of ordering a dish per person. Alternatively, request the staff to reduce the quantity in your plate before they serve you.
Take condiments with food only if you intend to consume them. Many fast food joints provide packed condiments, by default, along with your order. Ask them to remove extra condiments right when you are accepting your order lest them citing hygiene reasons for not reusing if you return later.
Trivia: As per a Greenpeace report, 855 billion sachets of food and personal care products were sold globally in 2018.
Get the food leftover at the table packed to take along. Give yourself or someone else a chance to have a feast again.
Buffet spread
Experiment with spoonfuls of dishes, not platefuls. If you’re the experimental kind, go ahead, try everything you want but take a minimal quantity to taste first (you can taste it right at the counter). If you like it, there’s unlimited supply at your disposal. This helps save food (you didn’t like) from getting discarded.
Choose a small plate over a large plate, if possible. This will encourage you to neither overstuff your plate nor your tummy. Taking multiple trips to the buffet counter will also help you achieve your step count for the day 😉
When ordering in:
Order as per your appetite; less is better than more. In case you’re not able to finish your food at once, treat your leftover food just as suggested above.
Ask for removing accompanying condiments if you don’t intend to consume. Vast varieties of sauces, kimchi and dips that come along with Asian cuisines and fast food can be avoided from landing in waste if they are never demanded.
Overall, try minimizing ordering in (unless absolutely necessary) for this does no good to health or the planet over the long run
Health: Eateries (incl. many of those which sell ‘healthy’ food) solve for taste, not health so that you keep returning to them. There is zero visibility on the kind and quality of water and cooking oils they use, the freshness of ingredients which go into preparing your food and chemical contents of tastemakers that make your food ‘tasty’. As long as the final product looks and tastes good; there's a low chance you will question the source.
Environment: Accompanying packaging - carry bag, disposable boxes for food and condiments, paper napkins, plastic tapes and clingwraps to secure the food inside the boxes, aluminium foil, disposable cutlery and additional brand packaging (box sleeves, printed menu card / promotional material) - all from a single order is highly likely to end up in trash cans unless you’re a hoarder (eventual destination still being the garbage bin). Plus there are additional energy costs involved in getting your order from the restaurant to your doorstep.
In case you’re doing all of the above, you’re already doing it right. Kudos to you! Inspire folks around you.
If you’re not, there’s always a first time and that time is NOW.
Agricultural land is the sum of cropland and pasture used for grazing livestock
Besides wastage reduction for larger cause, see some side benefits like; frugality and better health😊
Very real!