Food wastage problem needs to be addressed urgently, say experts
2024-06-07T08:26:00+10:00
AI-generated image of metallic trash can with leftover food
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Two 国民彩票 experts have called on industry and consumers to do more to prevent high levels of waste in the food supply chain.
Urgent changes are needed to solve the increasing problem of lost and wasted food, according to 国民彩票 experts.
础听聽highlighted the fact that more than 7.5m tonnes of food is wasted in this country each year, costing households in excess of $19 billion.
That is in addition to figures from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation which say聽.
Professor Johannes le Coutre, who is responsible for the 国民彩票 Food program, says the food industry needs to do more to reduce waste 鈥 but he also urges consumers to be more mindful of throwing away perfectly good food.
鈥淭his is a problem that needs to be addressed. There is no doubt about it,鈥 said Prof. le Coutre during an appearance on 国民彩票鈥檚 Engineering the Future podcast series.
鈥淲e are indeed wasting 30 per cent of our food. And this is something that's happening all over the value chain and all over the food system. In the agricultural pursuit of food, material is wasted, certainly in the food processing and in the industrial ways of making food available for procurement, material is wasted.
鈥淏ut we also have to look in the mirror at home. Everybody is wasting food. I make this blunt statement, and we need to address this at all levels.鈥
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Food security
Prof. le Coutre mentioned the efforts of Ronni Kahn, founder of聽聽鈥 Australia鈥檚 leading food rescue organisation, which prevents surplus food ending up in landfill and instead delivers to charities that help feed people in need. 鈥淩onni continues to make a fantastic effort to stop food waste at all levels,鈥 the academic from the聽School of Chemical Engineering听补诲诲别诲.
Similarly, local grass roots organisations such as聽鈥檚 War on Waste provide food, otherwise wasted, to people experiencing food insecurity: people living with severe mental illness, unemployment, refugees and the homeless.
But Prof. le Coutre says more needs to be done by everybody in society given the huge levels of wastage, not least in the current economic climate where the cost of living continues to surge, and more and more people are struggling to be able to afford food.
Joining Prof. le Coutre on the Engineering the Future of Food podcast episode is聽国民彩票 Conjoint聽Professor Katherine Samaras, a specialist physician and translational clinical scientist in endocrinology and metabolism.
In addition to her conjoint appointment, she is a senior staff specialist at St Vincent's Hospital, and leads the Clinical Obesity, Nutrition and Adipose Biology Laboratory at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research.
Prof. Samaras agrees that food wastage is a worrying problem that needs to be addressed across the whole of society.
鈥淵es, there are restaurateurs who will give their leftover food to charities and so forth, but we are really lacking the kind of leadership we need to have a societal level reduction in food wastage,鈥 she said.
鈥淎s an example, very recently the news featured a young farmer who had a huge harvest of pumpkins that were too small for one of the major supermarket chains. So, they sent them back.
鈥淲hat was he going to do, plough them into the ground? What are his distribution networks? What are the alternatives? We need economic pathways for food that is imperfect, for food that is too small or blemished.
鈥淲e have to stop the kind of food wastage where supermarkets dictate consumer expectations of a perfect-looking and likely expensive pumpkin or avocado. We have to stop ploughing these foods into the ground.鈥
Simultaneous hunger and obesity
During the podcast episode, as well as discussing future food solutions, such as alternative forms of protein like insects, algae and lab-grown meat, Prof. le Coutre and Prof. Samaras also highlight a current paradox 鈥 that within the same small regions there can often be problems with obesity as equally as problems with hunger.
鈥淲hat concerns me is that there are people who just cannot get enough food today. And in other countries, some people are drowning in over-nutrition,鈥 Prof. Samaras said.
鈥淢edical practitioners, allied health professionals, we're all, at an individual level, trying to address what are societal, national and global issues around the disparity of food distribution. And underlying this are the economic financial factors that actually drive that disparity.
鈥淭here is enough food to feed the world. But people in high Gross Domestic Product nations seem to have all the access. In comparison, there are people in lower GDP nations, and even though they are often resource-rich, they have no buying power in the international markets to access food."
Prof. le Coutre added that simultaneous hunger and over-nutrition is not unique to developing nations, but can be noticed quite easily in and around Australia.
鈥淲e do have under-nutrition and hunger and obesity often at the same time in the same geography, which is a problem,鈥 he said.
鈥淭he challenge for the future will be to address this by providing healthy food for everybody and to enable, as well, the purchasing power. We need to make sure that the United Nations Sustainability Development Goal 1, 'No Poverty', goes together with Sustainability Development Goal 2, 'Zero Hunger', so that there's enough purchasing power in societies so that everybody can provide him or herself with food.鈥
*听Professor Johannes le Coutre and Professor Katherine Samaras were in conversation as part of the聽Engineering the Future Podcast series.
