I stare at the scales in disbelief and feel a touch of despair. After being so careful to watch what I eat, the numbers on the digital display are higher than the week before. I rewind our meals for the last seven days while poking through the bin.
There, underneath some potato peelings and carrot tops, lies the culprit: a chicken carcass, picked clean of every trace of meat but still weighing a hefty 450 grams. Damnit, I think, this kind of weight-watching is nearly as bad as the other sort.
In August my family was one of 76 households participating in a month-long food waste survey conducted by WasteMINZ in partnership with councils in Wellington, Tauranga and Dunedin. The study asked participants to separate out and record their food waste – everything from chicken bones to vegetable peelings, tea bags and half-eaten school lunches – for 30 days, filling in a short survey at the end of every week.
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Some households (like mine) also received “intervention” resources such as meal planners, menus and food waste reduction tips, to see if these made a marked difference to the food wasted.
This programme, which WasteMINZ Sector Project Manager Sarah Pritchett describes as “experimental”, is a local attempt at learning more about a global problem.
Globally, around a third of all the food produced goes to waste. In Aotearoa, the Ministry for the Environment says that 9% of New Zealand’s biogenic methane emissions and 4% of our total greenhouse gas emissions come from food and organic waste. When food waste goes into landfill, it decomposes without oxygen and releases methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide.
The fact that food is becoming increasingly expensive doesn’t seem enough to make us do any better. In June 2022, a nationwide study claimed that New Zealanders are throwing away more food than ever before. The Rabobank-Kiwi Harvest Food Waste Research, which surveyed just over 1500 people, estimated that household food waste had risen to 13.4% a year, up from 8.6 percent in 2021.
Men, urban dwellers and people born from 1995 onwards, wasted significantly more than women, those living rurally, and those born before Kendall Jenner and Timothee Chalamet.
Taking part in the WasteMinz study was illuminating on several levels. Love Food Hate Waste reckons the average household wastes about 86kg of food a year and I was hopeful that we’d do better than that.
We’re a family of three (plus dog) and 99% of our meals are cooked from scratch. Our freezer often contains bags of bread crusts, solo egg whites and cooked rice, along with containers of mystery leftovers that only reveal their true selves when thawed.
I have the skill, imagination and time to repurpose these things into new meals, but I know lots of other people (including the other members of my household) wouldn’t be bothered.
“We’re all busier,” Pritchett says. “Once, there used to be someone at home who managed the household, but we don’t have that any more. Even kids are busier, with more activities and more opportunities.”
In my household, spending a month tracking our waste made me a bit fanatical. I started lecturing my husband about scrubbing potatoes instead of peeling them. One evening, when assessing the uneaten contents in my daughter’s school lunchbox, I briefly thought about wrapping them up and giving them to her to eat (or not) the next day.
Some weeks, no amount of prior knowledge or Love Food Hate Waste tips seemed to stop accidental waste. Try as I might, there was no rescuing the half-eaten tub of cream cheese that had hidden behind a yoghurt container in the fridge and gradually turned an attractive shade of green. Two limp lettuces went into the compost because they were buried under a bag of apples; a putrid stench from the pantry turned out to be a huge, rotten, stinking potato that had rolled behind a bag of flour.
Each week of the survey we were asked to evaluate how much of our food waste was “unavoidable” and I felt like a failure when our tally rose above 10%. Whenever surprisingly heavy bones went into the bin – the aforementioned chicken carcass, a Flintstone-sized ham hock – I felt irrationally guilty and wondered if vegetarians on the trial were weighing in with less waste.
For her part, Pritchett is more concerned with the bigger picture. She wanted data that went deeper than social media engagement with Love Food Hate Waste promotions and the pilot has delivered a healthy helping of it.
Preliminary survey results show a marked difference between participants who received and used the intervention resources, compared with the control group. While people with the resource material reduced their food waste by an average 7% over the period, food waste increased by 22% for the control groups.
Pritchett says she is “delighted” by the results and is looking forward to following up with participants to see if the new behaviours have stuck.
“I know myself, sometimes dealing with your food waste is too hard.or not a priority. But reducing food waste is the easiest thing people can do to reduce carbon emissions,” she says. “Everyone produces food waste and everyone can reduce it.”
HOW TO REDUCE YOUR FOOD WASTE
Check before you shop and plan your meals
Shop with a list and stick to it
Avoid multi-buys or large bags of produce unless you know you’ll use it all
Use your freezer as a ‘pause’ button to keep food in good condition until you work out how to use it up (most things can be frozen successfully)
Remember the 2-2-2 rule for leftovers: two hours to get them into the fridge, two days to eat them, or two months in the freezer.
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