Food For Thought

Food wastage problems we should be seriously thinking about

By Renaldo Amota

It’s six o’clock in the evening. The sun is setting as I’m lazily coming into my favourite part of the commute - the last part. I love it because I’m finally off the highway on a sideroad that’s so quiet at this time that I could claim it as my own without much debate. I found it particularly scenic this evening. This massive rolling hill painted on the backdrop of a golden orange sunset. The breeze teasing the tips of the tall grass and surrounding foliage. I pass this hill almost everyday. Twice a day. From this angle, you would never guess that it’s essentially a facade for the local dump. Thousands upon thousands of tonnes of garbage hidden under dandelion camouflage.

I’ve always been amazed at the human ability to hide and ignore problems. The truth is, we pass by these massive illusions everyday. This epiphany had jarred me a little and as a consequence made me slightly more alert about the world around me which is why I almost fell off my chair when I read the statistics about food wastage.

“Here we go,” I thought to myself. Yet another travesty I’d been leisurely passing by my whole life, except I was literally on top of this one. The evidence lined my own garbage can, just as much as my local landfill.

“Nearly 60 percent of food produced in Canada, amounting to 35.5-million metric tonnes, is lost and wasted annually. Of that, 32 percent, equalling 11.2-million metric tonnes of lost food, is avoidable and is edible food that could be redirected to support people in our communities. The total financial value of this potentially rescuable lost and wasted food is a staggering $49.46-billion.” (cited Second Harvest.ca)

Just for some perspective. 11.2-million metric tonnes is equivalent to the weight of 95 CN Towers.

This got me thinking. This is us. This is what we are doing right here in Canada. We are isolating ourselves. We are in a bubble of abundance and have created a culture of waste within it. The $49.46-billion is three percent of Canada’s 2016 Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It would feed every person in Canada for the next five months. In this age of connection, with all our tools and avenues to communicate, we have somehow let an avoidable problem get really bad. We have isolated ourselves from the problem.

But the first step to solving food wastage in Canada is simple. Awareness. There are people out there right now trying to make a difference.

Chef Jagger Gordon and his Feed it Forward (feeditforward. ca) program is fighting for the cause via his pay-whatyou-can grocery store which is stocked entirely out of items deemed “unsellable” by food terminals, bakeries and grocery stores; unsellable due merely to bruising, an odd-shape or size, or prepared foods that don’t get sold, or consumers confused by date labels.

In British Columbia there is an organization called The Community Cabbage (uviccommunitycabbage. wordpress.com) which is a volunteer group on the campus of University of Victoria that serves one free hot meal a week to the campus community. The meal is comprised of ingredients that would otherwise be deemed waste and the idea behind the campaign is to educate about food wastage, cooking and our perception of what deems a piece of food as actual waste.

Love Food, Hate Waste (lovefoodhatewaste.ca) is another Canadian organization that works directly with Canadian businesses, governments and communities to address food waste concerns. They run a blog that hopes to inspire many Canadian homeowners to follow suit as well.

The Feedback App (feedbackapp.ca) was created to get you deals from your favourite restaurants. They donate part of their proceeds to causes against food wastage and are actually partnered with Second Harvest (secondharvest.ca), Canada’s largest food rescue charity and the ones who put together all of these food wastage statistics.

We also shouldn’t forget about the pressing issue of hunger in Canada. Four million people in Canada experience food insecurity; one in eight Canadian households struggle to put food on the table; eight out of 10 provinces saw an increase in food bank usage in 2016.

We are in desperate need of these initiatives. With hunger being a problem right here on our doorstep, there should be no excuse to waste this much food. These organizations against food wastage are plentiful across Canada which you can do something to make a difference. Do your research, give to charity and volunteer your time. There are people that need you out there. We are in the most connected time in our lives and we need to make a difference in food wastage.

Food for thought. ~