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Earth Day 2024: Four effective strategies to reduce household food waste
We are researchers who have worked or are currently working on solutions to this issue of food waste.
Why food loss and waste occurs
Food waste and loss occurs at every stage of the food chain.
Pre-distribution food loss can occur, for example, due to poor harvests. Meanwhile, the post-harvest handling and storage can also cause waste as food is discarded for imperfections or damaged in transit.
While some food loss and waste—such as with eggshells, tea bags or bones—is unavoidable, a lot of it can be avoided, especially in retail and household settings.
In households, food is primarily wasted due to spoilage, with the greatest volume lost being perishables, especially fruits and vegetables. This last area accounts for nearly half of all food waste in Canada.
Consequences of food loss and waste
In Canada, each household is estimated to throw away nearly three kilograms of food that could have been eaten each week. To put that number in context, that is about 15 apples or large carrots sent to the landfill unnecessarily each week.
Beyond money alone, food waste may also impact the health of our diets. Often, it's the nutrient-rich fruits, vegetables and perishables ending up in the trash, rather than shelf-stable ultra-processed foods which have known health consequences.
With food loss and waste occurring at every stage of the food chain, the solutions are needed at every stage as well. While food loss earlier in the chain may be harder to avoid, retailers and households hold the power to address food waste every day.
Current solutions targeting food waste include upcycling food waste, creating city compost programs to reroute waste away from landfills, and promoting consumer awareness via education to prevent food from becoming waste in the first place.
Interventions for food waste in practice
Eager to address this global issue, our research group developed and piloted a four-week intervention in 2020 to reduce household food waste among Canadian families.
Mothers, fathers, and children were invited to participate in four week intervention with the following components:
1) A cooking class
2) Four text messages per week including information about food waste and reminders to reduce waste
3) A toolkit, which included things like a veggie brush (to reduce vegetable peel waste), a cookbook focused on reducing food waste, meal and shopping planner, reusable containers to store leftovers and a fridge magnet poster showing where foods are best stored.
The families reported high satisfaction with the overall intervention and special appreciation for the cookbook and veggie brush as tools in food waste prevention.
Parents also reported increases in confidence to reduce household food waste. The children involved in the study also reported improved ability to interpret best before dates—or food that is not as fresh as it was, but still perfectly edible.
At the household level, we found a 37% decrease in avoidable fruit and vegetable waste measured using four-week food waste audits where waste was collected and weighed out separately.
These results are promising in that they demonstrate that even in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic (summer 2020), families could still reduce food waste using simple tools and prompts without decreasing fruit and vegetable intake. Another promising result is that we were able to engage both parents and children, resulting in individual and household-level changes.
Tips for healthier eating and reduced food waste
Incorporating healthy food into our diets should not be too much of a chore, but busy schedules and rising grocery prices can get in the way.
Finding simple ways to reduce household food waste is crucial.
That said, responsibility for food loss and waste should not only fall on individual consumers. While individuals can make a difference, larger policy changes—in how food is grown, processed and distributed—are also needed.
If you are interested in eating healthier and helping improve our planet's health, here are some steps you can take:
Citation:
Earth Day 2024: Four effective strategies to reduce household food waste (2024, April 22)
retrieved 22 April 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-04-earth-day-effective-strategies-household.html
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