Food Recovery - Long Term Pain Ahead?
Kim Truong, convenor
Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash
Imagine the culture shock that I, a frugal, second generation immigrant child faced when I discovered the astronomical amount of uneaten food dumped at my local shopping centre food court.
First world countries’ comfortable lifestyles may bring us much happiness in the short term, but how often do we stop to think about food security in 30 years, when the world population is set to hit 10 billion.
The pandemic taught us heaps, and is continuing to humble us with its apparent ubiquitous systemic issues, even after the peak of toilet-paper supply frenzies.
Iceberg lettuce that would chomp off half my hourly wage.
A smudge of poop on a Havaiana from Bali that could wipe out the cow population in Australia.
Also, see attached: the beheading of the beloved broccoli.
My friend’s $7 small soy matcha latte at a cafe in Mount Waverley. (This one stung the most, to be honest.)
And it’s only just the beginning.
It’s becoming more evident that we will have to undergo some disruptive changes in the food supply chain to overcome the challenges of food security and feed 10 billion mouths.
Something needs to change.
Perhaps we step back and revise how we view food and the means to reduce the mass food wastage that traumatised me as a child.
Vågsholm, Arzoomand and Boqvist (2020) used the food recovery hierarchy suggested by the US Environmental Protection Agency, honing in on how each dimension can help us reduce food wastage and improve food security. This triangle suggests the most to least preferred ways of preserving food. It’s a great starting point for us to be aware of food waste.
Source: https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-management-food/food-recovery-hierarchy
The world has a mega challenge on their hands: how to ensure sustainable food security, while easing threats such as rapid urbanisation (leading to increased consumption of animal products), limited nutritious food supply and political conflicts seeing export supply shocks (as we saw in Ukraine).
Diving into the insights provided by Vågsholm et al. (2020) within the Food Recovery Hierarchy, the most preferred means of food recovery is reducing the volume of surplus food. Their perspective is that investing in the reduction of wasted or lost food will be just as valuable as investing in additional food production capacity. (Equally distributing food would solve more than half the problem.)There are plenty of novel ways to achieve this. Vågsholm et al. (2020) suggests means such as intelligent labelling and sensors (identification tags, freshness indicators) which can reduce food waste. By coupling these tools with analytical methods, we can efficiently process higher levels of food safety.
The next preferred means of food recovery is redistributing and reprocessing of food. Food banks are important to ease food deprivation. However, donated food tends to be close to their use-by date. Some of the challenges that food banks will face are limited resources for transportation and food storage, unpredictable food supplies bleeding into the aforementioned issue and less structured or incomplete cold chains that increase the risk of infecting people with food borne diseases.
Reprocessing wasted food to feed animals comes with its benefits.
But there are obvious issues. Foot and Mouth Disease. Need I say more?
There ARE regulations around feed producers, such as Queensland’s Biosecurity Act 2014, which require a higher standard of supervision around processing of food waste. These along with the use of plant based food scraps could reduce the carbon footprints of resources
Then, there is the conversion of food waste into fertilisers. This can be quite valuable for farming purposes but there is a risk of releasing pathogens such as the avian flu virus.
And yes, we’ve reached the least preferred and unfortunately very common end stage of food - incineration and landfill. Landfills, self-explanatory. They don’t look good, nor do they smell good. Plus, rats. And the bounty of diseases they carry with them. Yikes. There is though an upside to incineration. Lighting fire to stuff reduces the risks of nasty landfill-rat-diseases.
Like I said earlier, this is just one step to knowing where your food goes after you’ve decided you’re done with it. Five years, ten years down the line, we might be faced with another infectious disease or climate disaster that could see disruptive measures being taken to ensure our growing population continues to be fed.
But we have the power now to think about and adjust our own food purchasing behaviours. Councils like Monash City Council are doing weekly green bin pickups (for food scraps and garden prunings) to convert into compost.
What steps will you take to contribute to food security?
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