The Lost Mouthful

No. Impossible. Can’t be. Here it says that 40% of the food grown in the world never gets eaten; it goes to waste. Must be alarmist; let’s check the website of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. The FAO figures that one third of food produced is wasted, not much less than the 40% - horrifying! Wanting to know where on the long road from farm to fork this staggering loss occurs, I decide to watch the film “Taste the Waste”. I watch about half of it and have to stop. I cannot see yet one more scene in which a truckload of fish/bread/vegetables/apples lands on the scrapheap.

I retreat to the more-distant printed word and learn that

-the amount of food wasted each year would feed the world’s hungry four times over.

-an amount of water equal to the annual flow of the Volga River is used to grow wasted food.

-an area three times the size of Thailand is used to grow food that is wasted

-the bread discarded each year in the EU could feed all of Spain

So where is all this loss taking place? In the developing countries, mostly before production: poor farming practices, disease, parasites, inadequate storage and transportation. In the developed world too severe quality standards and restrictions are often to blame. Tomatoes are thrown out because they are not quite red enough, potatoes because they are the wrong size, carrots because their shape is weird. “Sell-by” and “best before” dates are widely misunderstood as being indicators of safety, whereas they generally indicate quality. Discrepancies between supply and demand are the major factor everywhere. Farmers are left holding the bag of zucchini because the market doesn’t want it, restaurants and grocery stores toss out perfectly good food at the end of the working day.
 
At this point I realize that one’s personal experience with food waste repeats in microcosm what happens on the worldwide scale. There is the friend in Vermont who did not have time to get all the tomatoes in her garden canned and made into sauce before an early killing frost squelched any further processing plans. I have just experienced the temptation to simply throw out a glut of figs, very ripe, that I blithely accepted from a friend here – not realizing that there would be 1700 grams of them! Scrounge in the cupboards for suitable containers for jam, rush to the Coop for more sugar to make it. While at the grocery store I chat with a friend who is buying too much food for the visitors who will arrive tomorrow, because she is so afraid of running out.

I remember chatting with the farmer’s wife when I went to pick up apples and learning that the major grocery stores won’t take the ones with the tiny black spots, which are perfectly harmless, because people won’t buy them. Cosmetics seem to have taken the place of taste as the deciding factor in purchasing. Having enough money and enough food tips into unnecessary perfectionism.

So where does this leave us as a society and as individuals in relation to wasted food? The best option for food unsold by the end of its particular limit is to get it quickly to those in need. Food pantries for those on welfare abound in the States, here in Switzerland Tischlein Deck Dich and Schweizer Tafel fill the same need, as does the zanily named Flying Croissant in Zurich. Imagination plays a big part in solving this problem, particularly for the housewife faced with unexpected leftovers – pop them into the freezer, make soup, add them to salads, make dried breadcrumbs/croutons out of stale bread, make pudding out of stale cake. Food no longer fit for human consumption may be just fine as animal feed, and resources are saved that would be used to grow that quantity of feed. Finally, composting works for the community and for the individual, and the production of biofuels or fertilizer is another community option. 

Most of all, there needs to be a rethinking of date labeling. “Best before” means only that there may be changes in consistency or color, for instance, after the date given, but the food will still be safe. Trusting one’s sense of smell or taste or vision is still the best bet. To bolster your confidence there is the maximum storage times for foodstuffs brochure put out by Cornell University and the Food Marketing Institute, called the Food Keeper: http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/TheFoodKeeper.pdf

And now back to that fig jam. It didn’t jell properly. Bummer. I suppose I could cook all 8 jars of it up again with added pectin, but the enthusiasm wanes. It should be good mixed with yogurt or vanilla pudding, or on porridge, or used instead of sugar in cake or puddings, or mixed with peanut butter or cream cheese, or made into jam tarts, or…..I am certainly not going to waste it!