Fighting food loss and food waste

Pop­u­lar wis­dom has al­ways pro­vided us with use­ful ad­vice re­lated to food, and surely the broad­est one, shared be­tween cul­tures, re­gions and gen­er­a­tions, is the one that says: “food mustn’t be wasted”. This sim­ple prin­ci­ple has in­spired hu­man­ity for cen­turies, and has al­lowed us to face ter­ri­ble hard­ships by ap­ply­ing com­mon sense when it comes to deal­ing with food. Throw­ing away food has al­ways been one of the biggest mis­de­meanors in any fam­ily. But the emer­gence of today’s con­sumer so­ci­ety, with su­per­mar­kets that put every­thing within reach, through­out the year, mak­ing it easy to pur­chase, has bro­ken this his­tor­i­cal thread and caused a bub­ble of op­u­lence that is ever more dif­fi­cult to sus­tain. Today, throw­ing away food is a sad and wide­spread re­al­ity in the first world. Shops, restau­rants, busi­nesses, and fam­i­lies all throw away food on a daily basis. Yet some gov­ern­ments are be­gin­ning to re­alise that the prob­lem is struc­tural, and they are launch­ing cam­paigns to pre­vent and re­duce food waste, while a num­ber of cre­ative so­lu­tions are on the rise. Through ef­forts to com­post food scraps and elim­i­nate sin­gle-use plas­tics, restau­rants, chefs, and or­gan­i­sa­tions de­voted to sus­tain­abil­ity are test­ing out new ways to re­duce food waste. With a bit of plan­ning and prac­tice, any­body can re­duce food waste and have a more sus­tain­able kitchen. Nose-to-tail cook­ing, that is, mak­ing dishes that use the en­tire in­gre­di­ent, is an ac­tion that every­one can do at home, too.

In the back­ground, there is also con­cern about an un­cer­tain fu­ture, also in terms of food, for which west­ern so­ci­ety does not seem to be pre­pared. The era of op­u­lence has plunged the West into a re­al­ity of false abun­dance, of easy and rel­a­tively cheap ac­cess to what we be­lieved were un­lim­ited re­sources, at a time when world hunger is on the rise. All the sta­tis­ti­cal and sci­en­tific data ad­vise us to change our habits and pre­pare for a world with more dif­fi­cul­ties, where basic re­sources – water, food, en­ergy – can­not al­ways be taken for granted. Be­com­ing aware of it is the first step. In our first of issue of the year, you will find the fea­ture On the table and not in the bin (pages 14-21), which ex­plores food waste and of­fers ex­am­ples of good prac­tices that will help you main­tain a more sus­tain­able re­la­tion­ship with food, re­duce food waste and help the en­vi­ron­ment.