Rethinking Food Waste

We’re fully into spring now. Roses are budding and blooming, the plum tree is showing signs of fruit, the winter veggies have gone to seed and it’s time to plant for summer.

Which gets me to thinking about food, because we all eat. And with seven billion people in the world and rising, that’s a lot of food and a shocking amount of food waste. One third of all food produced (~2.5 billion tonnes) is lost or wasted each year. A lot of that food goes into landfill where it ends up contributing to greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change.

Let me borrow something from a recent blog by Seth Godin, which you can find here - https://seths.blog/2023/04/profiting-from-food-waste-confusion/

Creating the food we eat has significant climate impact. Some of the factors, in unranked order:

• We clear forests to create farms
• We use petro-chemicals to make fertilizer
• We grow plants and then feed them to animals
• Chemical run-off and erosion have significant impact
• We transport everything using trucks
• Some foods use far more land, water and fertilizer than others
• Some domesticated animals produce particularly potent gasses
• We refrigerate, heat and process the food

Even if we wasted no food at all, the impact of all of these activities would be enormous.

All of this is to say that food and food choices, while only accounting for about 5% of the carbon emissions at an event, has a much larger overall impact systemically in the world and we need to be thinking about this when we think about our food planning and food choices at an event.

I continue to believe and continue to challenge the event industry to realize and acknowledge that reducing our carbon emissions and being a part of the solution to climate change is our biggest task in order to survive and thrive in the coming years.

So, I want us all to rethink our food choices as a carbon reduction strategy at our events.

In my last Patio Perspective I proposed adopting a plant-based or default veg diet as a way to reduce carbon. That’s certainly a viable way of looking at it but it’s probably more complicated than just telling everyone that they now can’t or shouldn’t eat meat. If we want to be inclusive we need to be more strategic than just replacing one way of eating with another without any input from our attendees or from looking at the broader picture of farming, farmers, food producers and how food gets to market and to your buffet tables, tables or boxed lunches at your events.

Also, I should throw in a disclaimer here and say that I do eat meat and fish while trying to be more default veg as much as possible and being conscious of where my food is sourced from and how it’s produced.

This is just to say that I don’t think we should be food shaming. People eat the way they do sometimes for very specific reasons and not everyone can always eat the same way or eat the same foods. For example, May is food allergy awareness and celiac disease awareness month and we’re going to talk about that and how it fits into food planning and food choices on our next Patio Perspectives event on May 17th with Tracy Stuckrath. https://www.dhirubhai.net/events/patioperspectivesepisode27060025602233303040/.

There is also a question here that is hard to answer sometimes - what foods create the most carbon and what foods are most wasted? There are carbon implications in both parts of that question.

We all know, intuitively, that beef, lamb and meat in general are high on the scale of carbon emitting and carbon intensive foods in the way they are raised, processed and transported. A reasonable carbon reduction strategy would certainly include reducing these foods, if not eliminating them. (I know of at least two relatively large conferences that went to a completely plant-based diet for their event.)

We also know, intuitively, that some seafood is overfished and transported from long distances and that local fish that meet sustainability standards would also help reduce carbon emissions and food waste overall. This could be another area of rethinking our food choices.

Here’s the rub though. Let’s say we do run an event and have a completely plant-based diet as our food strategy. Are we convinced that we have eliminated food waste and carbon in that strategy? Is anyone measuring the amount of food wasted when attendees don’t want to eat a completely plant-based diet?

There may be no perfect answer, but we can rethink and make better food choices and cut down on our carbon emissions overall.

Some things to think about:

• Ask attendees their preferences and maybe have an opt-in strategy for meat/fish
• Move towards a plant-based or default veg diet whenever possible
• Adopt a FLOSS strategy - fresh, local, organic, seasonal, sustainable
• Work with chefs and caterers on food portions to cut down on waste
• Donate unused food and understand local regulations for doing it
• Source food as locally as possible and know where food is being sourced from
• Measure your food miles and keep an account of carbon emissions associated with food
• Partner with and ask your food providers to work with farmers doing regenerative farming and using soil as a carbon sink
• Compost whatever isn’t consumed or donated
• Support policies that reduce deforestation and the overuse of land for beef production
• Support policies that eliminate or reduce the amount of chemicals used in food production

All of these are both individual and collective actions we can all take. And the more we can collectively rethink our food choices the more we can be a part of the overall solution to climate change.

I’m looking forward to summer and the food bounty that comes with it. I’m also looking at my own food choices and how I can lessen my impact on the planet. I invite all of you and the event industry to do the same.