September 29th is an important day on the UN calendar – the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste (IDAFLW).
It’s exciting that the UN made this designation in late 2019, reflecting the need to further raise awareness of the scale and impact of global food loss and waste while higlighting the need for solutions across the food supply chain.
Now on its fourth anniversary, and positioned between Climate Week and World Food Day, the IDAFLW reinforces the importance of the global goal of halving food waste by 2030 (as covered in Target 12.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals).
Further, the IDAFLW reminds us of the importance of halving global food waste, and cutting food losses across supply chains, to drive food system transformation and accelerate progress toward the SDGs.
As FAO notes, “reducing food loss and waste must be central to the transformation to more efficient, inclusive, sustainable and resilient agrifood systems for better production, better nutrition, a better environment, and a better life.”
This year’s theme for the IDAFLW, Reducing food loss and waste: Taking Action to Transform Food Systems, appropriately highlights the transformation aspect.
The food system is at the heart of all that we do, making food waste a critical nexus issue. By cutting food loss and waste we achieve a huge multiplier effect – freeing resources to reduce hunger, cut emissions, reduce water and other resource consumption, reduce ocean pollution, ease pressure on land, forests and biodiversity, and more.
FAO recognizes this critical linkage, noting that “Sustainably reducing food loss and waste means we can potentially increase the availability of and access to food. This can generate win-wins across a number of SDGs, including nutrition targets, while contributing to environmental sustainability.”
Some Progress on Food Loss and Waste
Many positive developments have occured in the food waste space since the SDGs were announced. To name a few:
- The prior decade was unquestionably a successful period of awareness raising.
- NGOs and technical solution providers like Leanpath have effectively conveyed the importance of measurement and the maximum benefits of prevention.
- The business case for food waste reduction is clear and widely accepted.
- Many foodservice organizations have made commitments to halving food waste in operations by 2025 or 2030.
- New reports on food loss and waste by UNEP, FAO, WWF, and many research teams are getting more granular, highgilighting impacts and identifying areas for interventions.
- Cities are more engaged on food waste reduction initiatives.
- The food waste (and broader food system) connection to climate change is clear.
- The food waste sector continues to attract innovators and funding.
- Food waste reduction policies and legislation are growing among states and nations.
- The upcycling movement is growing rapidly
And yet despite these many strong drivers, the pace of global food loss and waste reduction is not moving fast enough.
We must move faster, setting even bolder targets and closing the commitment to action gap worldwide.
As the Champions 12.3 group noted last week in its annual assessment, the “world is lagging woefully behind on ambition to reduce food loss and waste.”
The Champions group’s press release stated that “Without a transformative shift, the world will miss this singular chance to reap the social, environmental, and economic benefits that would result from halving the amount of food that’s lost or wasted every year.”
The group emphasized that we need to be doing more at the country level, particularly where losses are highest, adding that “As COP28 approaches, It is paramount that governments recognize halving food loss and waste by 2030 as a critical solution to the climate crisis and ensuring food security for a growing population. Investing more resources and funding into this fight is urgently needed.”
While frustrating to those of us immersed in the food waste space, the lack of faster progress on food loss and waste reduction meshes with the broader SDG situation. At the halfway point to 2030, the UN recently noted that only 15% of the 169 SDG targets are on track, with many going in reverse.
We are well aware of the power of the nexus aspect of food waste, and the substantial contributions to emisions reduction and food security that halving food loss and waste would provide. As WRAP pointed out in a recent Brief focused on moving from food waste commitments to action, “we cannot achieve net zero emissioins without tackling food loss and waste.” And food loss and waste reduction is essetntial to reducing hunger and poverty.
There’s no question we need to see greater ugency, bolder actions, and clear reporting on the part of food organizations and governments to cut food loss and waste across all sectors of the food supply chain.
And on this fourth annual IDAFLW, as I reflect on the need for big, urgent change for food waste reduction to drive the needed food system transformation and accelerate progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals, I find myself coming back to culture change – and at core – the basic need to properly value food.
Moving Faster, Transforming Culture
In developed world countries like the U.S., we are privileged to live in a culture of abundance regarding food, far different from the frugal, responsible culture of the War years (an era to which today’s generation has little exposure). Today, consumers typically equate value with the quantity of food received. Portion size matters, large buffets and value-meal combinations are expected.
We expect blemish-free, “perfect” produce of uniform shape, size and appearance, and we expect excessive variety on a 24×7 basis. We are literally surrounded by locations to obtain food and bombarded with messaging to buy and consume it at all times. Acquiring food is increasingly easy; if desired we can simply purchase it with a few clicks and await rapid delivery.
Our food is relatively inexpensive, so we expect low price deals, while disposal of excess is efficient and inexpensive. We have large refrigerators and pantries and take comfort in having large amounts of food on hand, but we are often confused by date labels and therefore quick to discard (and replace) food items which remain perfectly good for consumption.
Taken together, all of these factors make developed world citizens increasingly disconnected from our food and the embedded resources involved in producing and bringing it to us each day.
Further, they drive a costly cycle of overproduction, overpurchasing, and excessive waste.
Tragically, while roughly 800 million citizens are hungry across the globe, we’ve devalued food in affluent regions and normalized high levels of waste.
We know the social and environmental cost of food waste – food loss and waste alone accounts for about ten percent of globel emisisons. And the world faces a pending monumental challenge of providing sufficient healthy food for 9.6 billion citizens with far less environmental impact – while today, at a population of 8 billion, one in three lack access to a healthy diet and we are far overshooting planetary boundaries.
The required change to our food system is enormous, and reducing food loss and waste is an essential pillar of that transformation.
Amid the many inititative efforts to reduce food waste, we can’t lose sight of culture.
We must move away from today’s culture of abundance regarding food to a culture of responsibility.
Reprise: Signals of our Wasteful Culture
As individuals we can and must play a role in this culture transition by being engaged change leaders.
As I often note, the change process starts with recognzing and engaging on the signals of food system dysfunction, and in this case specifically recognizing and questioning examples of the improper valuation of food.
I’ve covered several such examples on this blog over the years, and for this International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste, it feels appropriate to revisit several of them succinctly in highlighting the need for culture change.
In May of last year, for example, I described an experience at a Panera Bread location in which a store manager robotically discarded several perfectly good breakfast souffles in accordance with the chain’s internally-mandated time limits. What was especially troubling was that he did so despite the fact that I told him that I was perfectly willing to buy one of those souffles. Evading my request, he responded: “I have to, they are way past time, I have to, I have others to replace them.”
In this case he acted in robotic compliance with company rules – discarding perfectly good food which could have satisfied me (a paying customer) or which could have been diverted to food recovery organizations or employees (anything but landfill). Even worse, a teenage employee witnessed the entire exchange – no doubt internalizing the justification for the disposal of perfectly good food. The message: if my employer easily sanctions such waste, why should I act differently?
I wrote about a similar experience at “changeover time” at an airport restaurant in 2015 in which a customer was denied from buying the same item that I had just purchased one minute earlier, while a tray of food was mechanically pulled for displosal due to the time cut-off. Such transactions occur countless times across foodservice operations in the U.S. every day. When we see them, we have to consider the impact – not only in terms of the lost opportunity to feed hungry people and the environmental impacts of the waste – but also the behavioral effects on consumers. How are their attitudes toward food shaped when they see repeated, and even mandated, disposal of edible food items? And how much waste could be reduced if we challenge strict time standards in food operations and focus on maximizing the value of excess food resources?
In February of 2021 I covered a disturbing situation in which food retailer Fred Meyer (a division of Kroger) disposed of thousands of pounds of high-quality food following a power outage from a winter storm. Following strict time thresholds, employees discarded large amounts of packaged meats, cheeses, yogurt, butter, juices, and other items. Upon seeing a dumpster full of desirable food, several community members sought to salvage these items, only to be blocked by store employees – who eventually called the police to keep their fellow community members from taking the food.
Here again, employees were disposing of food in accordance with company guidelines designed to minimize the risk of potential legal action from anyone who might claim to be sickened by the discarded food. Imagine the takeaways of the store employees – first being instructed to discard food that wih minimal effort and thought could have been donated to food insecure neighbors, and then being pitted against their fellow community members in preventing them from taking the discarded food.
In November of 2016, in a post entitled Valuing Our Food – Words Matter, I drilled into much of the terminology surrounding our food offerings and the constant word associations underscoring our ability to get high quantities of food for little cost with little regard for any excess. I noted that these phrases increasingly lead us to equate value with quantity and incorrectly reinforce a mindset of an inexhaustible supply of food.
In February of 2017, in a post entited Go Big or Go Responsible, I covered a number of observations related to systemic problems of excessive portions, overproduction, and cultural acceptance of high levels of waste – including the story of an Army mess hall sergeant who continully discarded large quantities of food due to overproduction but who elected not to reduce order quantities for fear of having his budget reduced in the future.
In that piece I also delved further into Americans’ obsession with “big” regarding food, noting the validation of herculean-sized portions and related waste depicted in the callously-named television series Ginormous Food and the plethora of dollar-combination offerings (2 for $2, any size for $1, $5 combination meals, fixed price all you can eat offerings, etc.) which not only lead to overeating (exacerbating health problems) but also lead to considerable food waste trucked to landfills (causing environmental harm).
Here I noted that many of our institutions have a culture that is too tolerant of a continual cycle of wasted food, and that restaurants, retailers, and media producers are contributing to the problem by “cheapening” food in the eyes of consumers – the very group we must successfully engage (particularly the youngest consumers) to change our wasteful behavior.
And last in this reprise of posts highlighting the insufficient valuation that we apply to food amid our culture of abundance, in July of 2019 I described a lunch encounter at a Las Vegas convention center in which the restaurant charged the same price for one slice of pizza as for two. While I attempted to order only one slice in this time-constrained setting, the foodservice staffer mechanically noted that I might as well take two slices, because I was going to be charged the same price for one as for two.
Thus, in a hurry in between sessions, I ended up overeating and wasting food at the same time. How often do foodservice providers lead consumers down a path of overconsumption and waste through such pricing? And consider the numbing impact on foodservice employees, who see the aftermath of such models in terms of excessive plate waste.
From Signals to Action
These five examples are just a few signals of the many entrenched drivers of food waste in our culture of abundance. We all experience them, and once we begin to take the time to reflect deeply on the significant social and environmental costs of these signals, we will be well-posiitoned to challenge them.
And by challenging them rather than accepting them, we can influence the needed culture change in our family, workplace, and social circles.
It’s a role we all must embrace.
I find FAO’s message from Expo Dubai appropriate and inspirational: Think misison possible, small changes make a big impact.
Fifteen years ago, food waste activist Tristram Stuart famously stated that “industrialized nations need to learn what it means to live in scarcity – because the appearance of infinite abundance is an illusion.”
As we see the impacts of climate change around the globe and realize the threats to food production, coupled with annual loss and waste of 30-40% of global food production, his words very much ring true.
We have no choice but to act aggressively to reduce global food loss and waste.
We cannot achieve climate goals, nor achieve food security, without shaply cutting food loss and waste.
The Champions 12.3 Progress Report mentions the concept of tipping points, and with regard to halving global food waste, we are very much in need of a tipping point.
As individuals, we can and must play a role in changing entrenched food wasting behavior, leading the shift away from a food culture of abundance to a culture of responsibility.
There’s no more time, nor food, to waste.
food for thoughtful action 