Jul 26, 2019 05:55 AM
https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/wasted/
EXCERPT: . . . Waste is an issue throughout the global food chain. Roughly one-third of our food supply—about 1.3 billion tonnes—gets wasted every year. A European or North American consumer may waste up to 115 kilograms per year, 10 times more than their counterpart in sub-Saharan Africa or south and Southeast Asia. But the problem is especially egregious in the seafood category, where nearly a third of global stocks are overfished. Wasting food—especially fish—appears to be an inefficiency our species cannot afford to keep up.
[...] From the moment a fisher lands a fish to the moment that fish lands on your plate, 27 percent of it will disappear. ... with all the other fish that disappear from the global food system in a given year. Imagine we piled up all those discards—all 46 million tonnes of them—in one very smelly spot. They would fill one of the world’s largest landfills, which (incidentally) is not located in China or India, but hides in plain sight just outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. ... Just imagine the stink.
[...] It seems like an easy sell. Who wants to waste food? People feel guiltier about wasting food than they do about wasting pretty much any other thing, perhaps alive to the fact that there are many people in the world who do not have enough to eat. Most agree it is undesirable, even immoral, to waste food no matter what their political stripes or socioeconomic status. And yet. As we busily agree with each other, our discards continue to pile up.
In January 2019, The Avoidable Crisis of Food Waste announced that more than half the food in the Canadian system was disappearing. [...] Experts generally distinguish between two types of disappearance in the system: food loss and food waste. Food loss happens between harvest, processing, manufacturing, and distribution, all the way up to but not including what happens at retail. When retailers and consumers discard food, experts consider this food waste.
Martin Gooch, VCMI’s CEO, has been analyzing food disappearance since the late 1990s. He quickly identified its reduction as an opportunity for his clients [...] to increase efficiency and profitability. The phenomenon is so invisible that many of Gooch’s clients didn’t even know the cost of what they were losing: they hadn’t calculated how many more items they would need to sell to recoup the cost of items that were lost or wasted. A 2010 VCMI paper concluded that avoidable waste increased the cost of food by 10 percent or more. Gooch kept digging. A 2014 VCMI report suggested that Canadians were wasting $31-billion worth of food each year. The 2019 report suggests the number could be closer to $50-billion. We’re not necessarily wasting more food than we were in 2014. VCMI is also getting better at identifying and measuring the waste.
Disappearance happens at every link in the global seafood chain. It begins on boats with fishers who may waste half their catch because of the technology they use: bottom trawlers are notoriously destructive and undiscriminating in what they haul up; by-catch is discarded. Government regulations are another challenge: they sometimes encourage fishers to throw dead or dying creatures back into the sea because they’ve reached their quota or caught the wrong species or the wrong size of fish. And then there are the economic factors: markets value and pay more for certain species. If space on a boat is at a premium, fishers will toss less valuable creatures to make room for more valuable ones.
In a country like Canada, though, most food disappearance is driven by the ways in which retailers, consumers, and the hospitality industry interact with one another. Together, they are responsible for nearly half the food that disappears: a staggering $23-billion worth.
This was not always so. Food waste per capita rose 40 percent in Canada between 1961 and 2009. Moreover, it outpaced increases in the food supply. While we can agree that food waste is a problem, most of us think it is a problem created by someone else: in one study, 72 percent of respondents thought they bought just the right amount of groceries. Yet the average Canadian household throws out a third of its food. This remains true for the seafood category, with a caveat: since about half of our fish consumption takes place in restaurants, so does half our fish waste.... (MORE - details)
EXCERPT: . . . Waste is an issue throughout the global food chain. Roughly one-third of our food supply—about 1.3 billion tonnes—gets wasted every year. A European or North American consumer may waste up to 115 kilograms per year, 10 times more than their counterpart in sub-Saharan Africa or south and Southeast Asia. But the problem is especially egregious in the seafood category, where nearly a third of global stocks are overfished. Wasting food—especially fish—appears to be an inefficiency our species cannot afford to keep up.
[...] From the moment a fisher lands a fish to the moment that fish lands on your plate, 27 percent of it will disappear. ... with all the other fish that disappear from the global food system in a given year. Imagine we piled up all those discards—all 46 million tonnes of them—in one very smelly spot. They would fill one of the world’s largest landfills, which (incidentally) is not located in China or India, but hides in plain sight just outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. ... Just imagine the stink.
[...] It seems like an easy sell. Who wants to waste food? People feel guiltier about wasting food than they do about wasting pretty much any other thing, perhaps alive to the fact that there are many people in the world who do not have enough to eat. Most agree it is undesirable, even immoral, to waste food no matter what their political stripes or socioeconomic status. And yet. As we busily agree with each other, our discards continue to pile up.
In January 2019, The Avoidable Crisis of Food Waste announced that more than half the food in the Canadian system was disappearing. [...] Experts generally distinguish between two types of disappearance in the system: food loss and food waste. Food loss happens between harvest, processing, manufacturing, and distribution, all the way up to but not including what happens at retail. When retailers and consumers discard food, experts consider this food waste.
Martin Gooch, VCMI’s CEO, has been analyzing food disappearance since the late 1990s. He quickly identified its reduction as an opportunity for his clients [...] to increase efficiency and profitability. The phenomenon is so invisible that many of Gooch’s clients didn’t even know the cost of what they were losing: they hadn’t calculated how many more items they would need to sell to recoup the cost of items that were lost or wasted. A 2010 VCMI paper concluded that avoidable waste increased the cost of food by 10 percent or more. Gooch kept digging. A 2014 VCMI report suggested that Canadians were wasting $31-billion worth of food each year. The 2019 report suggests the number could be closer to $50-billion. We’re not necessarily wasting more food than we were in 2014. VCMI is also getting better at identifying and measuring the waste.
Disappearance happens at every link in the global seafood chain. It begins on boats with fishers who may waste half their catch because of the technology they use: bottom trawlers are notoriously destructive and undiscriminating in what they haul up; by-catch is discarded. Government regulations are another challenge: they sometimes encourage fishers to throw dead or dying creatures back into the sea because they’ve reached their quota or caught the wrong species or the wrong size of fish. And then there are the economic factors: markets value and pay more for certain species. If space on a boat is at a premium, fishers will toss less valuable creatures to make room for more valuable ones.
In a country like Canada, though, most food disappearance is driven by the ways in which retailers, consumers, and the hospitality industry interact with one another. Together, they are responsible for nearly half the food that disappears: a staggering $23-billion worth.
This was not always so. Food waste per capita rose 40 percent in Canada between 1961 and 2009. Moreover, it outpaced increases in the food supply. While we can agree that food waste is a problem, most of us think it is a problem created by someone else: in one study, 72 percent of respondents thought they bought just the right amount of groceries. Yet the average Canadian household throws out a third of its food. This remains true for the seafood category, with a caveat: since about half of our fish consumption takes place in restaurants, so does half our fish waste.... (MORE - details)