From Global to Individual: Getting Personal with Food Waste
Today, we are highlighting work from students in Steven Finn’s course: MET ML626 – Food Waste: Scope, Scale, and Signals for Sustainable Change. This post comes from Emily Shawn.
But I don’t contribute to the global food waste problem, right? I’m not the one throwing away my meals and clogging up landfills.
Am I?
Household waste matters, and way more than I thought.
I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that I’m just not that wasteful. I usually finish my leftovers. I do my best to get through the finicky salad mix before it wilts. I compost, for goodness’ sake. I’m not really part of the global food waste problem. Am I?
I, like many consumers, have grown into the habit of thinking of food waste on a grand scale–that the waste produced by restaurants, businesses and agriculture is so extreme and severe that my small efforts as one individual person cannot possibly have any significant effect. Yet–and disastrously so–this “not my problem” attitude is not unique to me, nor are my thoughts that my personal waste is insignificant. When this same “not my problem” idea is echoed by the millions of people in Massachusetts, the United States, and the world, individual household food waste is in fact a driving factor in how sustainable we as humans can be with our food and our resources.
The NRDC in 2017 cited these graphs showing where food waste in three major cities came from:
Uh-oh. That big green section? That shows residential food waste. That’s the stuff in my refrigerator and pantry shelves right now–and the stuff sitting at the bottom of my trash can and out in my compost bin. Graphs like this offer a wake-up call.
Yes, grocery stores, manufacturers, and restaurants are guilty of waste, but household consumers take up a big piece of the pie.
Let’s zoom in. It’s one thing to think about food waste in cities I’ve never lived in. It’s quite another–and far more jarring–to think of the food waste in my own city.
Locally and as recently as January 1, Axios Boston cited a ReFED study showing that most waste, in fact 48%, comes from households.
It’s easy to assume that we all do better with our food than those other wasteful, careless people. However, do we really? Household waste is, if you look at the graphs, extremely significant. To reduce this in Massachusetts would be to reduce waste by almost 1 million tons!
Since a good first step in solving any problem is awareness, I stepped outside to gaze into the compost bin I share with my two roommates (and our two cats). As with many trash can mindsets, I don’t usually think too much about my compost unless I’m scraping my table scraps into the countertop bin, and even then I try not to look too closely. It’s turned into an out of sight, out of mind issue where it just fails to take up as much brain space as it should.
I popped open the 13-gallon bucket lid Tuesday afternoon and a big whiff of coffee grounds and something cruciferous hit me in the face. Ugg! It was about 1/3 full and had been emptied only Friday morning.
How did all those brussels sprouts get in there?! Are those…potatoes? Or mushrooms? What a sad place for these vegetables to end up.
I took a closer look. After having baked in 80 degree heat, none of this food was appetizing, but I’m sure it didn’t start out that way when it was purchased. So, I challenge you to start getting cozy with your food scraps. I say this not to shame anyone for not finishing a meal–we’ve all been there–but to gain a personal awareness of your own food habits and waste patterns. At the end of the day, what gets scraped into the bin? I realized I had quite a bit of coffee grounds, banana peels, and lemon rinds–items that would not really ever have been edible. However I also had a lot of brussels sprouts and other veggies. Here’s a closer look:
Grody, right? The smell alone was three-dimensional. In the future, I’d love to find a way to either cook these sooner, store them better, or not buy them at all if they’re not going to be used.
Getting some good quality, up-close-and-personal face-to-face time with my compost is helping me see ways I can try to reduce my food waste. Some of what goes in the compost is hard to keep out, like banana peels, coffee grinds and eggshells – unavoidable food waste that is not edible for humans. Now, when I track my compost I’ll keep a note of what I can most realistically try to reduce. Again, this isn’t about shaming my or anyone’s food consumption habits. This process is intended to bring awareness to my own waste and to look for ways I can reduce that. (Benefits include saving grocery money and actually eating my vegetables! Yay!) This process is also about the SDG (Sustainable Development Goal) Target 12.3. This Target calls for reducing food loss at the retail and consumer levels. The 2019 Food Waste Index shows that between households, retailers, restaurants and food service, 17% of available food ended up in waste bins. That’s a scary number, especially when there are millions of people desperately in need of food.
I might not be able to control what restaurants and retailers do with their food, but I sure can decide what happens to the food in my grocery bags and my pantry shelves.
Here are some great ways to reduce personal household food waste and keep your wallet plumb, your trash can empty, and your stomach happy:
- Observe, observe, observe. Challenge yourself to get up close with your food scraps. Figure out what actually goes in the bin, and why. Whether it’s over-purchasing, a meal no one liked, or the doomed wilty salad mix, track your food waste . Don’t give the garbage the privilege of hiding.
- Store your produce and leftovers to last. Food and Wine has a great article with tips on storing produce for the longest life.
- Meal plan. Make a list, buy only what you need, pack up those leftovers for lunch or tomorrow’s dinner.
- Donate eligible, usable food to pantries or micropantries. SDG Target 2.1 calls for ending hunger and ensuring access to safe and nutritious food for all people. It’s a pretty huge problem, then, if nutritious food ends up in the scraps bin. (*A word of advice, pantries are not trash cans for food you didn’t want to throw away yourself. Make sure any donations are still fresh and enjoyable. Read the requirements for food donations. Don’t pass on the burden of throwing away food scraps to donation centers).
- Consider composting. Though composting is a band-aid solution to wasting edible food, it’s still a step up from food going into landfills on incinerators. Locally, the city of Medford offers eligible residents free participation, as does Boston.
It can feel so overwhelming to think about the need for sustainability policies that I really don’t have the political power (yet) to implement or control. I can, however, look at my own trash and try to keep it as minimal as possible. At the end of the day, it’s up to me to determine what happens to the food that reaches my kitchen.