Reduce Food Waste

To learn more about the topic and to get an overview of possible methods to reduce food waste, I headed over to Wikipedia’s article on “Food Waste.” After looking back on how much food is thrown away in my household, I was not surprised to see the estimation of global food loss and waste was between one-third and one-half of all food produced. A study done by 2014’s National Geographic indicated that more than 30% of food in the U.S. aren’t eaten. The University of Arizona conducted a study indicating that 14-15% of edible food are thrown away untouched. Cornell University Food and Brand Lab conducted a survey and found that 93% of people acknowledged buying food that was never consumed. These statistics are quite high for a planet that still

Wikipedia also mentioned ways that I’ve never thought of such as, improving food packaging and having the government step in. The recent advance in technology comes with the invention of “smart packaging,” which gives consumers a more specific expiration date so that the unopened 14-15% of food that end up being thrown away can be saved. The government can also help by creating policies, like the one in New York City that banned the disposal of organic waste in landfills, or by working with waste collection companies to sort food waste to be fed to livestock. But even with so many different ways to reduce food waste, why is there still so much of it? For composting, Wikipedia states that it’s because: “the proportion of the population willing to dispose of their food waste in that way may be limited.” This leads me to think that maybe it’s the work that has to go into trying to reduce food waste that is putting people off. With this overview, I want to look further into which method is best for food reduction, taking into consideration that not many people may want to go through so much

I’ve never heard of the site, but I decided to give it a try anyway. I typed “food waste” in the search box and an impressive number of search results came up. Most of the articles were about the generation of food waste but I did manage to find an article titled, “Food waste generation and potential interventions at Rhodes University, South Africa.” The site only provided the abstract and I could not find the actual article so I googled the title with the author’s information. I was able to find the article on another database called ScienceDirect. The author referred to Alshuwaikhat and Abubakar (2008) to explain that “universities can be seen as smaller versions of cities owing to their large population sizes, hence the financial and environmental implications of their activities are potentially substantial.” One reduction method mentioned was educational and awareness campaigns. Instances given were the “Love food, hate waste” campaign launched in Great Britain in 2007 that yielded moderate success (Lebersorger and Schneider, 2011 and Quested et al., 2013) and Whitehair et al. (2013) found that simple written messages reduced food waste by up to 14% in a university dining hall facility in the USA. Another method was by making simple changes to existing systems. One example is getting rid of trays which encouraged patrons to make their food choices more