When you are raised by someone who once survived on potato peelings and coffee grounds, you develop a pretty healthy respect for food. My father, who lived in Poland’s notorious Łódź ghetto from 1942 to 1944, loathes the idea of letting any scrap go to waste. In my parents’ home, Friday’s roast became Saturday’s sandwiches and, if we didn’t polish it off, Sunday’s meat-and-BBQ-sauce mélange. Fresh bread went straight into the freezer and was defrosted by the slice to stretch the loaf’s life from a few days to as many weeks as it took to eat it all up.
Even before the economy tanked and my monthly grocery tab began to feel like a second mortgage, I was the type who ran a spatula around the inside of the mayo jar before declaring it fit for recycling. But I admit that my family of five still wastes plenty of food. I buy too much, bring home obscure veggies nobody wants to eat and make bad predictions about how many nights we’ll be home for dinner.
Mine is not the only household tossing out wilted lettuce and rancid cottage cheese every week. A new study from Statistics Canada found that in 2007 nearly 40 percent of our food supply was wasted by households, restaurants and supermarkets. An even more comprehensive 2008 British study yielded a similar figure: About a third of all groceries purchased, amounting to nearly seven million tonnes of food, is thrown out annually in the U.K. Those findings made headline news. (“Waste not want not, Gordon Brown tells families” and “Britain’s colossal food waste is stoking climate change” are only two of dozens of examples.) As a result of the study, a government-backed food-waste-awareness and-prevention campaign called Love Food, Hate Waste was launched.
Here in Canada, there’s astoundingly little ink devoted to our food-waste crisis, but that doesn’t mean nobody is paying attention. Take Wayne Roberts, who manages the Toronto Food Policy Council at Toronto Public Health. Author of The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food, Roberts is keenly interested in the issue from a global perspective. “A lot of the food that is produced worldwide, at great cost in terms of energy and labour, goes to waste,” Roberts says.
He’s referring not only to what we throw out at home, but to other forms of waste we don’t often think about: for starters, the bushels of potatoes abandoned in the ground or peaches left to rot on the tree when farmers can’t get as much for their crops as it would cost to harvest them. At sea, there’s the problem of bycatch – all of the edible fish and seafood that gets caught in industrial fisheries’ nets and chucked back (dead or dying) because it isn’t the salmon or tuna they were trawling for. Then there are the parts of the animal that we don’t buy and rarely eat, and – one of Roberts’s biggest peeves – the produce that is too big, too small, misshapen or slightly bruised and so never sold, even though it’s perfectly good to eat. As you might expect, grading systems keep these cosmetically challenged fruits and veggies out of our grocery stores, but the surprising bit is that farmers do, too. “The secret crisis of the food system is overproduction,” Roberts explains. We quite simply grow more than we can eat. But who can blame the farmers? They have a tough enough time making a living without flooding the marketplace with shabby-looking produce that will drag down the price of their goods, says Roberts. (As it stands, the profitability of fruit and vegetables is in free fall, says Art Smith, CEO of the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers’ Association, based in Guelph, Ont.)
