Food Wastage: Literature Review
According to Food and agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FOA, 2013) food waste refers to food appropriate for human consumption being that is discarded, whether or not after it is kept beyond its expiry date or spoiled. The global volume of food wastage is estimated to be 1.6 Gtonnes (one tonne is equal to 100 kilograms), while the total wastage for the edible part of food is 1.3 Gtonnes. This equals out to be One-third of all food produced in the world, that is lost or wasted from farm to fork. In developed countries, wastage occurs mainly at the retail and consumption levels, due to overly constraining regulations and unsustainable consumption patterns (Gustavsson et al, 2011). In Canada more than
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Well sustainable (tourism) development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (Dodds, 2015), since the food industry is so closely tied in with the tourism industry, food wastage is most definitely a sustainable tourism issue. Canada Retailers waste 10 percent of food thrown out in Canada, while restaurants and hotels waste a further nine per cent (Evans, 2014). Most of these foods that are wasted in the restaurants and food retail spaces are usually still edible for human consumption, and are just thrown out as some would consider them less pleasing to the eye (bruised fruit misshaped good). A common practice with bakeries is to throw out bread that was baked earlier in the day, to make room for new fresher baked bread for the next business day. Besides the service and retail industry food wastage is rampant in household across the country. In Toronto 275 kilos of food is wasted each year per house hold (Suzuki, …show more content…
Preventing food wastage at the source is much more beneficial than trying to mitigate food at the retail, consumption or post consumption level. Some examples of reducing waste at the source include improving storage methods, to prolong the life of the food during harvest.
Feed the Hungry. Donating food is not necessarily the solution to food wastage altogether, but it can help improve the effects hunger and poverty. It is the best option in terms of dealing with unavoidable food surplus from environmental, ethic and social perspectives (FOA, 2013). More and more restaurants and food establishments have been donating still edible food to the local shelters and food kitchen number of food kitchens.
Feed the Animals. If donated food is not suitable human consumption, the next best place to mitigate the food waste is by feeding farm animals, like pigs. This strategy for organic waste management is highly evolved among many food manufacturers and is often a source of revenue for production facilities (Food Waste Reduction Alliance,
The first step in achieving food security is to maximise the use of food already being produced and to minimise its waste. The FAO (2013) estimates that 1.3 billion tonnes
As Americans, we waste more food than many countries even consume. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, “The average American trashes 10 times as much food as a consumer in South east Asia” (Hsu). That is about equivalent to eating 10 meals to a consumer in South East Asia’s one meal. We throw away our left over food just because we are done ea...
By material, the three largest areas of recycling in Canada are organics, newsprint, and cardboard (Statistics Canada, 2008, para. 13). Organics include food wastes, and are the items that go into green bins. It was only recently in Ontario that green bin collection began on a regular basis, and according to a recent study, the program may have grown faster than initially expected. In 2007, t...
More than $31 billion worth of food is wasted every year in Canada and when energy, water and other resource costs are factored in the true cost could be up to as much as $107 Billion each year according to a report published by Value Chain Management International, a consulting firm, which suggests that millions of kilograms of food is wasted every year in Canadian homes, restarants, & grocery stores. This finding shows a 15 % increase from their findings four years ago when the cost was $27 Billion,in 2010. They also go on to say that this is 2% of Canada s GDP and larger than the total economic output of the poorest 29 countries on the planet.
According to Roni Neff, Marie Spiker, and Patricia Truant, up to 40% of all food produced in America is thrown away (Neff, Spiker, & Truant, 2015, p.2). This wasted food is worth hundreds of billions of dollars that is lost each year in the United States alone, and creates many threats to our country. Food waste is an important and widespread issue in the United States because most of the food thrown away is perfectly fine, it could be used to feed the hungry, and the waste hurts the environment.
Of course, if you don't need that much food you can always sell or give away all the excess.
Roberts believes that “food is a solution, a cause for joy and positive energy” (Roberts, page 18). Most of the time, it is more costly to waste the food than to use the food as a tool, which can bring new opportunities. As the example he provides in the book, Will Allen, a gardener from the US, uses spent grain as an opportunity to make compost for sale and to heat his own greenhouses using the heat generated from the composting process (Roberts, page 21). This way, he has also helped find an effective way to dispose of used food rather than treating it as trash which is actually not cheap to manage. Hence, Roberts concludes that there are so many hidden resources in the world, which can be used to work with food to create opportunities and to benefit the society, economy and environment while saving money (Roberts, page
The majority of people waste food on a daily basis. In fact, in the U.S. alone there is an estimate that over half of the food produced goes uneaten; meanwhile there are people who are in need of food, and it ultimately goes to waste (Dockterman). For example, in his essay, “On Dumpster Diving,” author Lars Eighner writes about his experiences of dumpster diving with his pet dog, during his years of homelessness. According to Eighner, much of the food and materials he came across in the dumpsters were in usable shape, and many items were new. Clearly there needs to be a change in American food waste, in current and, hopefully not so much in, future generations. In order to bring about change in this misuse of food, Americans need to be conscious
Each year about 27% of America’s food gets thrown out, with more than 300 pounds of food per person ending up in the waste stream. The disposal cost of such food exceeds one billion dollars in local tax funds annual...
Individuals waste some $14.6 billion worth of food every year, about 47 percent of the total. This mainly consists of food items that Canadians buy with the intention of using in their homes, but never do, so it ends up eventually in a landfill or composted. This is a very sensitive environmental issue as these composting facilities create massive amount of Methane gas that are released into the environment, damaging the ozone and attributing to the man-made manipulation of the global warming/cooling process. Food manufacturing and processing is responsible for as much as one-fifth of the food wasted across the country. Ten per cent of food waste happens on the farm, before even entering the larger food system. Retailers waste another 10 per cent. Restaurants and hotels waste a further nine per cent. The rest is wasted at processing facilities such as food terminals, or during transportation. The report notes that food waste in the travel sector is especially egregious — up to five kilograms per person, per day, according to some estimates. Even using more conservative estimates, these watchdog groups say that we could feed 200,000 inhabitants of poorer countries for a year with nothing more than the food that gets wasted on European airlines every year. On international flights, regulations require any excess food be thrown out after a flight — regardless of whether it was used, cruise liners seem to be the worst culprit, generating the highest per capita food waste. Waste like that costs everyone, not just the person who
Food waste is defined by food that is lost, wasted, or discarded and is caused through a few different processes. Food is wasted through many different ways at farms, grocery stores, and in homes. Over 40% of the food in the United States, specifically, goes to waste and 97% percent of this waste goes straight to landfills. The main issue with food waste is that the majority of food is being wasted unnecessarily. In stores, food is often thrown out because it does not meet specific standards that dictate what may be desirable to consumers. This issue of food picking is important as foods are not always being thrown away because they have gone bad, but because they have appearances that do not seem attractive. If we hope to lessen the environmental impact we have as a result of the mass
...veryday foods require a lot of energy and release a lot of greenhouse gases to produce. This is the reason we should stop wasting the foods, consume less meat, and eat more locally grown food.
The amount of food that is wasted in the world is astronomical, Finn states about 1.3 billion tons goes to waste annually. 40% of food goes uneaten just in the United States. The amount that is produced goes back to how and where it is produced and The
Policy is needed to regulate which course of action should be taken and how it should be implemented. Because of this, many plans and policies revolving around the management of solid waste have been put in place. Sometimes however, a particular policy can have its shortfalls, potentially resulting in its negative aspects outweighing the positive ones. According to the Conference Board of Canada Report, “Canadians dispose of more municipal solid waste per capita than any other country” (2013). Solid waste management in particular, involves many aspects, ranging from packaging waste, food waste, etc. (White & Franke 1999), hence, the following analysis revolves around household and commercial waste – referred to as Municipal Solid Waste (White & Franke. 1999) – in the Greater Vancouver Regional District. Municipal waste is a major health and environmental concern as it contributes to numerous problems like habitat destruction, surface groundwater pollution, and other forms of air, soil, and water contamination. Waste disposal methods like incineration create toxic substances, and landfills emit methane, which contributes to global warming. According to the Zero Waste Objective Report, “The impact of climate change and the increasing awareness of the role of “waste” and “wasting” in the production of greenhouse gas emissions is a constant environmental pressure… (2009). This leads to an increasing limitation of government to prevent and control the volume and toxicity of products in the waste stream and a growing need to shift responsibility to the product manufacturer.
Currently, magnitude amounts of waste materials generated from household and industries have become one of the main factors to cause environmental pollution. Especially, as for the leftover food, the portion of leftover food out of total wastes has been continuously increased. Increases in feed cost for animal production motivated to recycle leftover food into animal feed (Cho et al., 2004a). Recycling leftover foods into animal feed has become one of the most important.