Summer, its days fading quickly,
has been generous and kind this year. Sunshine aplenty, but without the
scorching heat predicted to become a regular feature of climate change.
Gardens have done well, despite slightly less summer rain. Our
vegetable patch is the best in several years. I’ve never seen apple trees in
the region with so much fruit. A couple of trees I pass regularly have branches
broken by the weight of the fruit.
Late summer is a time of year when
there seems to be enough fresh food to feed the entire world, and then some.
Unfortunately, that is far from true. The World Resources Institute estimates
that by 2050 the world will need 70 per cent more food than is produced today
to feed an estimated population of 9.6 billion people, 2.2 billion more than
now.
Simply producing more is not a
solution. Creating pasture land for grazing animals is eliminating millions of
hectares of forests, which is dangerous to world survival. There is only so
much land on earth and we already are seeing the dangers of messing with it.
There has been talk, accompanied
by some alarm, about world food shortages eventually forcing us to farm insects
for food.
One answer to food shortages is to
slow population growth. That is happening but not fast enough. World population
is expected to grow by only 50 per cent in this century, compared with an
incredible 400 per cent in the last. Still, that’s hundreds of millions of more
mouths to feed over the coming years.
One positive approach to a food
crisis is lifestyle change. Our society consumes and wastes too much of
everything, including food. We waste one-third of the food we produce: 1.6
billion tonnes a year, valued at $1 trillion.
Those figures come from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture
Organization.
An accompanying problem is that food
waste gets tossed into landfills where it produces methane emissions. These add
to the world’s greenhouse gas and climate change problems.
No one deliberately sets out to
waste food. It happens. Suppliers and growers guess wrong on what will be
needed. It happens to consumers as well. We’ve all planned a dinner or a party
and ended up throwing out food for a variety of reasons.
Then there are the psychological
traps that trick us into buying too much. Sellers want us to buy more and try
to entice us with promotions, incentives and special offers that get us to buy
things we might not need. One example is the quantity discount where you buy
two items and get a third for free. In many cases you don’t need the third, but
can’t pass up the deal.
An avoidable factor in food waste is
our expectations. We have been lured into the mindset of wanting fruits,
veggies and other foodstuffs that will win beauty contests. We have no use for
the marred or the malformed. Bruised apples or blackening bananas are ugly
ducklings that don’t get taken home.
Fortunately there are a growing
number of initiatives aimed at reducing food waste. Denmark, for instance, has
become a world leader with numerous initiatives that have reduced its food
waste by 25 per cent in the last five years.
A food waste supermarket in
Copenhagen has been so successful that a second is scheduled to open next year.
It sells food that regular supermarkets plan to discard because of overdue
‘best before’ dates, damaged packaging or incorrect labelling.
You can read more about Denmark’s
campaign against food waste at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/13/how-did-denmark-become-a-leader-in-the-food-waste-revolution
In San Francisco, a subscription
service named Imperfect Produce buys ‘wonky’ produce from farms that will
discard it because it does not conform to
industry standards of perfection. It delivers boxes of it at reduced
prices.
Here at home Loblaws has launched
the Naturally Imperfect program selling ugly duckling produce at cheaper
prices.
These initiatives are doing more
than working against food waste, or providing food at lower cost. Most
importantly they are helping to change attitudes about things that appear less
than perfect, and about what we really need.
As Mahatma Gandhi once said:
"The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's
greed."
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