DP #1: Food Waste in gastronomy industry

Limiting food wastage has seen the adoption of former WWI and II slogans by antiwaste groups such as Wrap.

My interest to this topic started a couple of years ago. My friend came back home from a Work&Travel program in the US. He worked in a restaurant in the Yellowstone National Park. Of course as he was a student, the work was hard and tiring, but it wasn’t the biggest problem. What he could not stand was one of his duties, which was throwing out the garbage full of edible food and it was around 200 kgs per day. At first I was thinking: “poor guy, he has to carry so much weight each day!” But than it hit me! I’ve started to think about the number of people carrying those wastes, multiplied by the number of restaurants, then by the number of countries etc. I was shocked!

Where does the schock come from? Because we (an average person only looks at his plate) do not think at large scale. If we think about the number of times we threw out something into the garbage, because we were not hungry anymore and multiply by the number of people in the world we start to see the whole picture. That is why the statistics are so important for this topic! I will present you some of them to give you a basic notion of the problem.

• an average restaurant in America disposes of about 50 tonnes of food wastes each year, from which 76% is organic and can be recycled
• the British restaurants dispose in total of 600,000 tonnes per year
• an average restaurant in Britain dispose of about 22 tonnes of food wastes per year, which means each time a person eats, it creates 0.5 kg of wastes
• in comparison british households throw out 12 million tonnes of food waste per year at a cost of $19 billion
• 27% of all food is being thrown out, which works out for to a 0.5 kg of food for every american each day
• full service restaurants throw out more food than fast food eateries. Food wastes make up respectively to 66% and 52% of all trash

This is a figure showing us the amount of disposed food wastes in different regions

That short list of numbers already can transmit to any person in the world that the problem is serious and that definitely some solutions have to be found.

There are a lot of reasons behind the colossal waste of food that goes on in the restaurant industry, but I would say that one of the largest causes has to do with corporate restaurant policy regarding the treatment of leftovers. And leftovers are not what come back on the plates. I am referring to the disposal of food that is left on the steam table or in the oven at the end of the night. that food can be reheated one more time with no risk of contamination that could come from the leftovers of customers, cooled properly and refrigerated. Most of corporate restaurants do not have that flexibility as the small restaurants have. Sometimes restaurants have special garbage tanks for food waste which are being closed. In their opinion people who take their food from garbage are thieves. But is this not against the idea of garbage? Even that in the whole world there are so many cultures and different habits, the idea of garbage is still the same. If you throw something out to it, it means you do not need it anymore, doesn’t it?

The situation is already changing, but there is still a long way to go. In my next entries I will develop more the topic and present some policies that are being or had been already introduced to improve the situation. Also you will get to know some possible solutions to this issue and organisations that are trying to change the way we think about food wastes.

References:

1. Gustavson, Jenny; Cederberg, Christel; Sonesson, Ulf; van Otterdijk, Robert; Meybeck, Alexandre (2011). Global Food Losses and Food Waste

2. http://www.greenecoservices.com/food-waste-in-restaurants/

3. http://www.independent.co.uk/ “UK restaurants waste 600,000 tons of food a year”

Comments Off on DP #1: Food Waste in gastronomy industry / 13 Nov 2011 por Piotr Adam Lubiewa-Wielezynski
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