Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Located in the South on Main (SoMa) district of Arkansas’ capital city, The Root Café has served locally sourced breakfast, lunch, and dinner to an often-packed house since 2011. Whenever possible, the restaurant maximizes their cabinet contents by incorporating food scraps, and what would otherwise be considered food waste, into their dishes. Much of the rest goes to a local farmer who uses the scraps to feed the farm’s pigs.
When a recent study highlighted generational differences in attitudes to food waste, a large number of media outlets reported the news that millennials are the worst culprits when it comes to throwing away food and contributing to the 7.3 million tonnes of food wasted by UK households each year. The reason? Apparently an obsession with social media, Instagram culture and a ‘live to eat’ attitude are to blame…
Atlas’ Rescue Brew is just one small example of how beer brewing may be turning into a new front in the fight against food waste. United Kingdom-based Toast Ale is leading the charge, and smaller projects are popping up around the world.
Proyecto Plato Lleno counts 439 food rescues in Buenos Aires, a total of 46,269 kilos of food saved from the dumpster. According to their calculations, this equals 92,538 “full plates” across 60 shelters, foundations, and schools.
However, the very core of the problem and the largest component of food waste is at the consumer level, which means the food wasted every day when each person buys, uses, and throws away food, based on how we live and what we value.
Since we set up Transition community cafe 4 years ago, many other surplus food projects have developed but most have food poverty as their prime purpose, so we are pleased that our key aims of carbon reduction and building community resilience have been validated and rewarded.
The result of a brainstorm between two college friends, Transfernation is now a dynamic organization fighting food waste in Manhattan and beyond with a sustainable, scalable business model.
Public, media and corporate awareness of the need to tackle food waste appears to be higher than ever, but evidence suggests that despite this growing awareness, efforts to cut household food waste in the UK seem to have stalled.
I was spurred on to start this project by the global epidemic of food waste — as much as 50% of all food grown worldwide gets wasted before and after it reaches the consumer. Most of the food waste in the UK is avoidable — it could have been eaten had it been better managed. The Community Fridge: Frome is a simple solution that is replicable across all communities, enabling anyone to share some of this surplus food while cutting costs and emissions.
But while a proliferation of food waste apps hope to combat the problem through technology, FoodCycle is tackling it by serving up hot meals to those who need it — along with providing a place for diners to build community and face-to-face friendships.
About 20 percent of crops in the Czech Republic (and up to 30 percent in Germany) never make it to our plates – all because of norms that determine size, shape and color of fruits and vegetables. “But since food doesn’t always grow uniformly, it has to be sorted,” says Strejcová. And this sorting often happens right on the fields during harvest time.
Five years ago, when we first started covering the food waste issue, America was throwing away enough food to fill the Rose Bowl every day.
