Food in the garbage? Stop to waste

There are 7 billion people on planet Earth, one billion of whom are in a state of hunger, with millions of victims each year. At the same time, 1.3 billion of tons of food, enough to feed 3 billion children, men, and women, are wasted annually. According to UN estimates by 2050 the world population will become 9 billion, and there won’t be enough food resources for everyone. Disturbing? Yes, but it is not an inexorable fate. The “hidden resource”. “We must stop being passive witnesses of food waste:” claimed Selina Juul, a young Danish woman of Russian origins that in 2008 set up “Stop spild af mad”, a non-profit consumer initiative against food waste, that promoted an extensive campaign to attract attention on the question of food waste, on the basis of the fact that the Danish population discard 540 thousand tons of food per year, amounting to 2 billion euros, and that the Copenhagen Resource Institute has described as “the hidden resource”. The challenge of “Stop spild af mad” is a 50% waste reduction by 2025 and to transform Denmark in the world’s less squandering country. Since 2008 as many as 20 thousand volunteers are involved in the initiative, and “one in two Danish people have already cut the amount of waste”, the promoters wrote in capital letters on their website, to signal the impact of the mobilization campaign. Campaigns, media pressure, debates and events of all kinds are the tools used to reach consumers and encourage them to act in their private spheres, reducing personal waste, reusing leftovers, making their purchases wisely, but also redistributing to the homeless or needy amounts food that would otherwise be thrown away. It’s a description of what has happened at the end of June during the international Roskilde Festival, a musical event held in the South of Denmark, with 130 thousand spectators. In the 8 days of the festival the volunteers of “Stop spild af mad” have collected almost 30 tons of food or leftovers, that were placed in a separate kitchen, set up for the occasion and redistributed to the homeless, in shelters, to families in difficulty or kept in large cold storage facilities for future use. The bag of good things. It’s possible to stop wasting food. All you have to do is to buy wisely the needed quantities; learn how to reuse leftovers (the website of “Stop spild af mad” provides a list of recipes with leftovers); don’t fill your plate with more than you can eat, and if you go to the restaurant, ask for a “doggy bag” for leftovers. A Danish food catering company (Uniliver food solutions) launched a campaign to transform “doggy bags” into “goodie bags”, thereby “breaking the taboo of bringing leftovers home when we eat out. It shouldn’t be embarrassing to walk out of a restaurant with ‘goodie bag’. On the contrary, it should be the sign of environmental awareness we should be proud of”, Uniliver said. Over the past years another “Stop spild af mad” campaign convinced supermarkets not to throw out the products nearing expiration date, but rather to sell them at a lower price, or persuade agri-food companies that “crooked carrots” or “small apples” have a market and should not be thrown away. Another initiative regards packaging: in a society with increasing number of single households and with smaller families food packs with large quantities of food are bound to be wasted. Making smaller packages of food helps decrease the amount of leftovers. No to disposable food. Why reduce waste? For Selina Juul “waste is the key for gobal survival”, which doesn’t mean that I can bring my leftovers to a starving child in Africa”, Juul added. However, there are countless benefits in not wasting food and “Stop spild af mad” lists them all: you don’t abuse of scarce earth resource; you act responsibly towards society as a whole developing a culture of respect versus a culture of consumption and throw-away; you contribute to reducing CO2 emissions, hence the greenhouse effect and global warming; you save money in the family ménage; you reduce the amount of waste helping to tackle the problem of its disposal. Selina Juul’s campaign has obtained the cooperation of the Danish Environment Minister, which in 2011 published a “Paper to reduce food waste”, presented to food industries, food catering companies, town councils, consumer associations for their public endorsement. A report published a few days ago by the Environmental Protection Agency, provides an overview of the experiences of European Countries in the framework of “waste prevention” programs, which will serve as a “basis for the development of the Danish government’s strategy in waste prevention”.