I always feel guilty if I throw out food. Perhaps it was having stories about the starving children in Africa drummed into me as a child, but these days there's the added discomfort of knowing about the waste of energy and resources that went into growing or making the food we throw out, and the pressure all this wastage puts on the planet - not to mention the rising cost of food and transport that takes a bigger bite out of the weekly budget.
Awareness and concern about food wastage is spreading, and there's a new spirit of thriftiness and frugality starting to infiltrate our way of life.
Most of us do not even realise how much food we waste. We may think it is only the occasional unopened or half-eaten pack of food, but if we looked carefully in our rubbish each week, we may well find it is much more. And then we go and stock up again, with more than we need, at the supermarket the following week.
Catherine Irvine, waste strategy officer at the DCC, says about 39% of waste thrown out in black rubbish bags is from food, a mix of both edible and inedible.
The council encourages people to compost their vegetable scraps and green waste, run a worm farm or use bokashi buckets, which ferment food waste that can then be used in gardens.
"We are quite a disposable society these days and we are getting people to think about this [waste] as a resource for returning nutrients back to the land, and there are many different methods of doing it," she said.
One project is the trio of rubbish bins at the Otago Farmers Market, including an organic bin, the contents of which go to a worm farm.
"When we audited [the market], up to 54% of their waste was potentially compostable, including food scraps, cardboard, serviettes - worms munch their way through that. We are working hard getting the education right and struggling to keep out contamination such as plastics. It is proving challenging but we are keeping at it and raising awareness," she said.
Much of the data on food wastage comes from the United Kingdom.Tristram Stuart's groundbreaking book Waste: Uncovering the global food scandal (Penguin 2009) claims 50% of food in the United States is wasted; in the UK, it is 20 million tonnes; in Japan, wasted food is worth 11 trillion.
Edible food is wasted by farmers, by processors, supermarkets, restaurants and consumers at home - few are innocent of throwing out edible food, and fewer still realise just how much is tossed away.
In the developed world, food is treated as a disposable commodity, but if we all stopped throwing away so much food, pressure on the world's remaining natural ecosystems - rainforests or perhaps the Mackenzie country - and on climate would be lessened, let alone the pressure on landfills and the production of greenhouse gases.
And the world's poor and undernourished, which includes people in the developed world as well as the developing countries, could be fed on food grown on a fraction of the land and resources used to grow what we throw away, according to Stuart.
There is little data about food wastage in New Zealand, but the Food Waste Innovation research group has recently been set up at the University of Otago with participants from the departments of food science, applied sciences, marketing, and sociology, gender and social work, according to Dr Miranda Mirosa, of the food science department.
Reducing food waste is a good way to start tackling some of the big issues of our times, such as poverty and climate change, she says.
She has been working on a project observing food waste in industry, focusing on cafes and restaurants and interviewing 20 local restaurateurs.
They all sent food waste to the local landfill regularly, 13 reporting that about one-third of their weekly rubbish was food waste, and seven thinking theirs was between one-third and two-thirds. Much of this waste is vegetable peeling and meat trimmings, but there is also plate waste, particularly uneaten bread, vegetables, salads and fries, she said.
Some cafes and restaurants are now offering smaller portions on their menus to help reduce the waste left on plates.
Three of those interviewed said they did not allow uneaten food to be taken home in "doggy bags" because of concerns about health regulations and possible liability if a customer became sick from the leftovers. The same risk of liability prevented restaurants from giving food waste to a pig farmer or a worm farm. Waste has to be heated to 100degC for an hour before it is fed to pigs, according to biosecurity regulations. Some restaurateurs were reluctant to make an additional effort to sort vegetable from meat waste, house extra bins in their kitchens, and arrange for it to be picked up by pig or worm farmers or composters, she said.
Another source of large amounts of waste food is supermarkets.
There are growing numbers of freegans, or dumpster divers, who reject consumer culture and often live on good food discarded by supermarkets or restaurants.
Craig Nieper, owner of Centre City New World in Dunedin, says he is not aware of anyone fossicking in his skips, which are kept locked.
In his supermarket they recycle plastic cardboard and paper, and often have products nearing their best-before dates for sale cheaply.
However, each week they still have half to three-quarters of a pallet of damaged but usable goods and products close to their best-before dates, which are written off as waste and go to a foodbank, he says.
Recently they put in a new stock replenishment system that helps reduce waste and ensure they have the right amount of stock at any time.
"The cost of stocking a place like this is pretty large, but even having a little too much versus the right amount can cost a lot of money so we try to get that right every day," he said.
More info
Useful books and websites:
Waste: Uncovering the global food scandal, by Tristram Stuart (Penguin).
Making a meal of it: Smart ways to buy, store and use up food, by Jane Willcox and Rosemary Cadden (Wakefield Press, 2011) The $21 challenge, by Fiona Lippey and Jackie Gower (Simple Savings).
Destitute Gourmet and other books by Sophie Gray
www.simplesavings.co.nz
www.lovefoodhatewaste.com
www.shelflifeadvice.com
www.destitutegourmet.com
www.foodsmart.govt.nz
www.tristramstuart.co.uk
