Wasting away
By Skyla Ruthven, McKinnon Secondary College
Consider this… food waste. What did you picture?
Possibly the mouldy cheese at the back of the fridge, the bruised apples in the fruit bowl, or maybe, the vegetables left on your plate at the end of a meal. But there’s far more to food waste than what meets the eye. It’s the food that never made it into your fridge or onto your plate in the first place, let alone the shelves at the supermarket. The food that took exorbitant amounts of time, resources, and effort only to go directly from the land into landfill. It is, according to the United Nations, the 1.3 billion tonnes of food wasting away in dumping grounds every single year.
These days, many know that the agricultural industry is one of the leading contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. From the production and processing of our food, to its distribution across the globe, the industry releases billions of tonnes of these potent gases each year. What few people realise however, and what the ABC’s War on Waste emphasises, is little more than half of the food we produce in Australia is ever consumed, with the remaining food enough to fill the MCG six times over each year! That means that up to 40% of the gases associated with agriculture are completely unnecessary. 40% of the time, resources and effort required to farm, going to waste.
By and large, this can be accredited to the unrealistic cosmetic standards of our time. Supermarkets have very specific expectations that define what makes a fruit or vegetable acceptable to sell on their shelves. So, if something is too big, too small, too fat, too thin, too bent, too straight, it’s thrown directly into the bin. If something is bruised or scratched or has a mark on it, it doesn’t make the cut. Take bananas for example, selling more than other fruits at 5 million per day, they are Australia’s most beloved fruit. They require 9 months to a year to grow, hectares of land, a laborious harvesting process, fertilizers, water, and money.
Yet almost half of the bananas harvested don’t meet cosmetic standards and are consequently discarded. Whether the Cavendish variety aren’t curved enough, or the Lady Fingers are too curved, millions of tonnes of bananas, like the 3.7 trillion apples and, according to the Guardian, 90% of our perfectly edible tomatoes that don’t make the cut, are simply thrown away. But, as Annie Leonard pointed out, “There is no such thing as ‘away’. When we throw anything away it must go somewhere.” And in this case, that “somewhere” causes even more harm to our planet.
When food rots in landfills, it produces methane, a type of greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than the gas that comes out of your car. In fact, it’s estimated that eliminating global food waste would be the equivalent of taking one in every four cars off the road. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations states that if food waste was a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, following the United States of America and China. Yet, while we are grappling with such extensive amounts of food waste, Australian Ethical highlights that more than 870 million people worldwide are chronically undernourished and go to bed starving every night. It is for this reason that food waste is often referred to as the world’s dumbest problem.
Growing up in South Africa, the issue of food - or rather, the lack thereof - was one I witnessed every day on my way to school. Families on the side of the road, barefoot and starving. Orphaned children begging for the scraps. Anything to get them through the long, cold nights. Children who instead of driving to school to receive an education like myself, even just a basic one to allow them the opportunity of future employment, were standing at the traffic lights, literally performing for their breakfast. Oblivious to the oncoming traffic, they would stand between lanes, faces painted and stomach’s empty, often juggling, cartwheeling between cars, or performing their notorious gumboot dance with shoes far too large for their tiny feet. All this effort often met with nothing more than the blank stares of passers-by, their performance not enough to secure them a single meal. These people continue to suffer at the hands of one of the most easily preventable, yet fatal conditions.
Killing an excess of 9 million people every year, that’s more than double the reported deaths of COVID-19 globally, hunger is often overlooked as one of those problems too impossible to solve. But we have the solution. It is literally right there in front of us, rotting away in landfill. We produce more than enough food to support the entire population, yet so many go hungry unnecessarily, as our food waste only continues to damage the environment. Food rescue organisations like OzHarvest and SecondBite were established with the intention of tackling this very problem and are prime examples of what good can come from redistributing our surplus food to those experiencing food insecurity.
Jonathan Bloom, an author and journalist, emphasises that “Food waste isn't considered a problem because, for the most part, it isn't considered at all.” It poses one of the biggest threats to our planet yet has such little recognition. Plastic straws are instantly recognised as dangerous for marine life. Everyone knows that transport produces toxic gases. But mention food waste, and it’s unlikely that the first thing that comes to mind is the millions of taxpayer dollars that are going down the drain, or the gases that are prompting our earth to become inhabitable, and probably not the human lives that are being lost every day as a result of our ignorance. Unless the image of the mouldy cheese and leftover vegetables is replaced with the reality, until this pressing issue is given the awareness it deserves, our planet, our future, our lives, will only continue to waste away.