The Vancouver Sun recently addressed the impact of big box stores on food waste. Amazing deals can be found at big box stores, but frequently at the cost of food waste. These deals can be so enticing that people throw food items into their cart without considering that they couldn’t possibly eat 10 lbs of broccoli before it goes bad. What seems like a a great deal ultimately ends up in the trash - a waste of money and food.
Amazingly, households contribute more to food waste than grocery stores, processors, farmers, and distributors combined. In fact, the food waste of households is five times that of grocery stores.
What can we do to reduce our household food waste? An easy first step is to make shopping trips more frequently. People who shop more often tend to purchase food in smaller quantities and purchase only food that they have a plan for, resulting in reduced food waste. When people shop once a week or every other week, it can be difficult to assess how much they will need and what they can eat before food spoils. Consequently, they end up purchasing excessive amounts.
Some struggles encountered by shoppers that results in food waste are that they prefer a full fridge with a lot of fresh, healthy options and find it difficult to make and stick to a shopping list of only what they need.
Those seem small sacrifices to make given that as much as 40% of all food in developed countries ends up in the trash.
There are many online resources available to help plan more conservative shopping trips and that offer tips on how to keep food fresh longer, such as http://www.lovefoodhatewaste.ca/.
If everyone made small changes to their food buying and storing habits, we could do a great deal to reduce food waste and help end hunger and food insecurity. These are simple, manageable changes that can ultimately do a lot of good for the world.
