With the holiday season quickly approaching and the festivities beginning to kick in, one can argue that the reason for the season (besides religious purposes of course) for those who celebrate Christmas, is food. Food has always been the highlight of gatherings especially during Christmas time. In Trinidad and Tobago particularly, food and Christmas go hand in hand. A ‘Trini Christmas’ experience would not be completed if you haven’t had any pastelles, ham, homemade bread, black cake, sorrel and the list goes on. You would typically find all these dishes in abundance in most Trinbagonian households as we cater for the occasional ‘parang’ from our family and friends. Although this year things may be looking different on that front as we are still living amidst the Covid-19 pandemic and the idea of large gatherings are not permitted.
*Parang: the act of going by a friend or family member’s house and eating the food prepared by them.
With the preparation of an abundance of these dishes, the issue of food wastage is raised. Food wastage happens more often than we may realize, and we may often disregard it or pay little attention to the matter amidst all the festivities going on. Food waste as defined by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is the decrease in the quantity or quality of food resulting from decisions and actions by retailers, food service providers and consumers. Food can be wasted in many ways including:
Produce on the shelves of farmers’ markets and supermarkets which supposedly deviate from what is considered to be optimal standards for purchase would be removed from the supply chain during sorting operations and discarded off.
Foods close to or surpassing the ‘best-before’ date is often discarded by retailers and consumers.
Large quantities of wholesome edible food which are not eaten or left over and discarded from household kitchens and restaurants.
The last point is the one I will be focusing on in this blog post. A report from the World Bank in 2012 lists Trinidad and Tobago as the most wasteful county in the Caribbean and Latin American region.
The United States reports that 40% of all food produced never gets eaten and more specifically during the holiday period between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, Americans waste 25% more food, than during the rest of the year. Furthermore, food is the second largest material disposed of in the U.S. landfills to this date. To put this into perspective, it results to each person on average discarding 20 lbs of food per month into the trash, amounting to a cost of approximately $1500 per year, per family.
Why is the issue of food wastage a cause for concern?
Have you ever considered how the food on your plate reaches there in the first place? The raw ingredients used to produce most foods are grown on land. Thus, land is acquired and cleared for agricultural purposes. The crops being cultivated require water amongst other supplements to grow. The process of harvesting and manufacturing the raw ingredient into food products which can be consumed requires water and energy. Essentially, we are seeing here that when food is discarded off, it also means than we are disposing of the land, water and the energy used to produce that food.
Additionally, the wasted food goes to landfills to decompose. The EPA estimated that in 2018, about 68 percent of the wasted food generated or about 42.8 million tons ended up landfills or combustion facilities in the United States alone. When foods are disposed of in landfills, they begin to decompose releasing the greenhouse gas methane in the process. Methane is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat within the atmosphere. Thus, the issue of food wastage is another factor we have to consider in our fight against climate change. One may not consider their food waste as a factor which contribute to the climate crisis, but as populations grow and the amount of waste generated increases, specifically food waste, it definitely adds up. More methane gas is produced and therefore fuels the climate crisis even further.
What can we do to minimize food waste?
Something must be done to eliminate this problem of food waste. Here are some few actions which can be taken to cease the problem:
1. Cook and serve with a plan, this entails finding the recipes for the dishes you want to prepare beforehand and determining the exact quantity of ingredients you would need for the dish. Make a list of the number of guests expected and cook to suit this number.
2. Shop smartly. Supermarkets and businesses on a whole love to encourage their consumers to purchase things they may not necessarily need. They do this by putting items on special offers. As a consumer, you must remember not because you are getting it means you have to purchase it. You must ask yourselves if you really need that item before buying it in order to prevent potential wastage.
3. Encourage the consumption of leftovers. Often times especially when cooking for an event, there would be an abundance of food remaining. In order to prevent the wastage, you can ensure that guests take home the remaining food. Another way in which leftovers can be minimized is by freezing those foods which can be frozen and consuming them at a later date. Freezing would prevent the food from spoiling and ending up in the trash.
By minimizing food waste, we are actively helping against the fight against climate change. Reducing the amount of wasted food in the landfills would essentially reduce the amount of methane gas produced. This would minimize the greenhouse effect and by extension, aid in the mitigation efforts against global warming and climate change.
Thank you for reading the post today. I do hope you learnt something new and as usual, feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section below.
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