How food waste fits into everyday life

A new report on the issue has found that a huge amount of food waste occurs before it reaches consumers.

Around 40 per cent of food is wasted globally and Dame Juliet Gerrard, the prime minister’s chief scientific adviser who wrote the report, said there was no evidence the situation was improving in New Zealand.

She said while personal shoppers can be very helpful, a lot of waste is out of their control.

Preventing food loss and waste at the source has the greatest potential benefits, the report says, while focusing solely on household decisions only addresses part of the problem. In Australia, it is estimated that about a third of food losses occur at the household level.

The report recommends setting a target of halving food loss and waste by 2030.

Gerard said there are changes at every step of the process.

“If you’re (a farmer) supplying to a large retailer, you sign a specific agreement committing you to supply a certain amount of produce to certain specifications. You don’t want to breach that agreement, so there’s a huge incentive to overproduce in order to meet those terms,” Gerard said.

“If you (a shopper) go to a supermarket and see a buy one get one free special, you might buy it. That reduces food waste in supermarkets, but if the food is sitting in the fridge, it doesn’t stop it from being wasted.”

“A lot of this is beyond the control of the consumer or eater and this report illustrates that,” said Kaitlin Dawson, executive director of Food Waste Advocates New Zealand, which helped publish the report.

But Dawson said customers have to do their part, too — for example, by turning down slightly damaged produce or taking only the newest items.

“The most wasted item in New Zealand is bread, but not just at a household level. How full is the bread shelf in your local supermarket? They keep it very full because that’s what we expect … at the end of the day there tends to be a lot of waste.”

She said packaging large amounts of food together could lead to waste, and “best before” dates could discourage people from choosing food that was still edible.

Another recommendation from the report is that food industries, such as bread or tomatoes, come together to tackle waste across the chain, something Dawson said had been used to good effect overseas.

She said overseas experience showed that voluntary business groups could take the lead, but at a certain point they would reach their limits and government regulation would be needed.

“There is still a lot we can do”

At the Fair Food warehouse in the Auckland suburb of Avondale, trucks arrive with bread, eggs, milk and produce from supermarkets, all of which is edible but cannot be sold because it is damaged, surplus or close to its “best before” date.

A lot of it was bread or bananas.

When interviewed by ABC New Zealand, veteran driver Vasene Pua was unloading box after box of bananas, which he said were in perfect condition but had been delivered by a local Countdown supermarket because they were unlikely to sell.

Manager Michelle Blau oversees rows of volunteers who sort the truck’s contents by hand: food suitable for fresh food packages that will go to the hungry; slightly damaged food, like soft carrots or bruised tomatoes, that will be turned into curries by chefs; and food unfit for humans that will go to the pig sty.

She said more bananas were arriving every day than they could deliver – they were “very ugly in appearance” and easily rejected by shoppers due to minor blemishes, and were imported into New Zealand in bulk.

She said Fair Food has entered into a partnership with an ice cream company to make banana toffee flavored ice cream and sell it to raise funds for the organization.

Bread is sorted at supermarket pickup points, picked up by drivers and placed into one of three bread bins at the Fair Food warehouse: Fat Breadies Drop, Breadie Mercury and Ziggy Starcrust. Blau said all the working parts of the warehouse have names.

“Last week we shared 13,973kg of food with people, 1,165kg of which went to local pig farmers, which added up to a reduction of 37 tonnes of emissions,” she said.

“I actually give the supermarkets a lot of credit for the fact that they had the choice to work with us. They really did the right thing and thought ahead and if no one is buying it, then we’re taking it off the shelves now while it’s still good.”

Ms Brough said if food rescue centres had better resources they could do “much more”, such as reducing the 90 per cent of food that is exported from New Zealand that is wasted. She said the food might be rejected if it was not perfect, but was perfectly edible.

“It’s one thing for something to have export value and be sold around the world, but it’s another thing for it to be good food for people.”

Dawson said current levels of waste were a problem because 15 to 20 per cent of New Zealanders did not have enough to eat, despite New Zealand growing enough food to feed them.

It is also a question of curbing climate change.

About 4% of New Zealand’s planet-warming emissions come from methane, a powerful warming agent, produced by the decomposition of food in landfill. This doesn’t include emissions from the waste produced by producing uneaten food.

“Every stage of growing food, packaging it, picking it, manufacturing it, shipping it, getting it to the shelf…if we waste that food, all those emissions are wasted,” Dawson said.

Some of the waste happens at the farm level, she said — for example, the price of broccoli can drop dramatically if there is an oversupply, making it cheaper to let the vegetables rot than to harvest and sell them.

But growers are too busy to find ways to use their surplus food, so they need help finding options such as food charities, juicing, powders or other avenues, Blau said.

Gerard added that not only does growing and wasting food create global warming emissions, climate change itself can also lead to food waste.

For example, hurricanes triggered by climate change have destroyed food-growing areas or disrupted supply chains, leading to oversupply of foods such as kiwifruit.

The report concludes that addressing the problem requires a coordinated approach.

But Dawson has a little tip that anyone can try — as soon as she buys her bread, she puts half in the freezer.