Food waste

Every day we’re enticed by food. In 2012-13 alone, IBISWorld stats show that Australians spent $136 billion on food for the home. When you add the food we bought in cafes and restaurants, the stats show we spent $158 billion in total on food. But how much of that did we actually eat?

Research by the NSW government shows the average NSW household throws out $1036 of edible food every year. If you extrapolate that across every household in Australia, we’re spending $8 billion a year on food that we buy and throw away. And the problem might be worse than that estimate — in 2012 the Victorian government estimated people threw away $2000 worth of food a year. The National Waste Report 2010 estimated Australians threw away 4 million tonnes of food a year, or enough to fill 450,000 garbage trucks.

In Australia up to 40% of the average household garbage bin is food waste. As someone who has audited bins and walked on landfills, it never ceases to amaze me how much high-quality, edible food is being thrown out. Much of the food waste I’ve come across hasn’t even reached its best-before or use-by dates.

Surprisingly, though, our food waste stats don’t include the food that never makes it past the farm gate. A Queensland government report estimated that between 15 and 50% of bananas were ploughed back into the ground because they didn’t meet the specifications of supermarkets and other retailers.

Government support should be given to develop ways in which farm-rejected produce like this could be cheaply bought by food charities such as Foodbank or Second Bite.

The problem of food waste is not just restricted to Australia. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted every year. That’s roughly equivalent to what is produced in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. With global population set to go up by 2 billion people by 2050, we cannot afford this level of inefficiency. At the same time, the UN reports that one in every seven people in the world go to bed hungry and more than 20,000 children under the age of five die daily from hunger.

So what’s the solution? Despite the popularity of cooking shows, there is still a poor understanding among Australians of how to purchase, store and prepare food. We need to become as “foodwise” as the generations that have gone before us.

At the very least, our federal and state governments need to run a national audit regarding the amount of food that gets wasted from paddock to plate in Australia. We need a co-ordinated approach in order to find out how much is really being wasted at the farm gate, out at sea, in our food production facilities, in our supermarkets and supply chains, as well in our homes.

The simple fact is that we need to use up every bit of food that we can. It won’t just save money at a household and business level. It can make a real environmental and humanitarian difference as well.

* Jon Dee is the Founder and Managing Director of the DoSomething! advocacy charity. He is also a food waste expert who runs the FoodWise.com.au website. You can follow him on Twitter @JonDeeOz