December 17, 2013, by Helen Whitehead

Advent calendar #17: Sustainability issue – food waste

Would you have thought that VIPs would ever eat imperfect fruit and vegetables?   Yet this was exactly what happened in February, when the United Nations treated 500 delegates at its Environment Programme event in Nairobi to a five-course meal of blemished African fruit and vegetables – exactly the kind of food that Western supermarkets would have rejected, despite being perfectly fit to eat.

Dr Adam Spencer talks about this in his recent post on food waste on the University of Nottingham’s Global Food Security blog

“Waste food is an important issue for people interested in food provisioning. Waste food represents wasted resources of water, energy and land and so has an environmental impact in addition to representing economic loss for farmers, retailers and consumers alike.”

Challenges to reducing food waste include working out exactly what is meant by waste food, and establishing how much is being wasted.  Some solutions are suggested by Adam Spencer but his post is worth a look to understand the magnitude of the problems faced in dealing with just this one aspect of sustainability.

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