Why are we wasting 40 per cent of our food?

A new study from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore puts frightening numbers to the amount of food we waste and throw away – up to 40 per cent.

“That is basically everything: all the food that comes off the farm,” Johns Hopkins associate professor Roni Neff, co-author of the study, told Yahoo Canada.

“Processing, distribution, retail, restaurants, consumer – the whole thing.”

Neff said the causes of this are complex.

“It’s for different reasons at different stages of the food-supply chain,” she noted.

“You could say there’s maybe an under-valuation of food, and sometimes it’s cheaper to do other things than to save it.”

So now you’re looking at the food in the fridge, assessing what’s still good and what isn’t. How to be sure? How to know what has to go?

Neff suggested there’s a different question – one that could have been asked way back at the food store.

“We’re not trying to tell people to eat something that could become unsafe. But what could we have done – by all of us – earlier on to either not buy that, or to think sooner that ‘oh, I’d better eat that?’”

Part of the problem, she thinks, is the way food is marketed.

“We in public health and the food movement have done a lot to push this idea of fresh food being the very best and only thing that you want to eat. And maybe it’s time to question that, and re-examine the idea that it has to be beautiful on the outside to taste good and to work wonderfully in a recipe.”

University of Guelph professor Kate Parizeau echoed that very point in a recent blog post on the desirability of less-than-perfect looking produce.

“It’s clear that it has to do with a disconnect between us and our food,” she says. “When we grew our own food it was easy to understand that this carrot next to the ugly one grew in the same conditions. There’s nothing wrong with it.”

One encouraging number? The number of people who said they were willing – and easily able – to reduce their food waste clocked in at 43%

“I see that as a big, wide open opportunity for ramping up our efforts on this,” Parizeau said.

A recent report found the cost of food waste in Canada totals $31-billion per year.

Neff points to the very encouraging results of recent waste-reduction efforts in Europe.

“In the U.K. they’re doing education, social media, they’ve got policy changes going on, they’re working with businesses to change practices like how sales are organized, or how food is packaged. They actually achieved a 21% reduction in avoidable consumer food waste in only five years. You don’t hear numbers like that very often!”

She also weighed in on France’s recent move to force grocery stores to donate unsold food to charities.

“I think this does put a certain onus on either the enforcer or the donor or the recipient to then have to sort through all that food. That’s a challenge, but given how far we are from where we need to be – and the amount of food that’s thrown away – I think that it’s worth taking on that challenge.”