Practicing Think.Eat.Save
Sometimes you just gotta go drastic, like reducing food waste by 50% in 2025.
There is enormous slack in our global food system, and nothing depicts this absurdity more than the colossal amount of food that is wasted each year.
There is wastage throughout the entire farm to fork process: that’s growing, say a tomato, processing it into sauce and bottling it, distributing it in trucks to the supermarkets where it sits on shelves, is purchased (or not purchased), taken home, stored and/or cooked and then eaten or thrown out.
A total of 1.3 billion tonnes of edible food is lost or wasted globally; that’s one third of all food produced around the world. If just one fourth of this waste was saved, right around the globe, the chronically hungry - some 870 million individuals - could be fed.
Wrap your head around a figure even closer to home: Australians waste one in every five shopping bags worth of food.
What would it take for Australians to waste zero out of every five shopping bags worth of food?
We need our leaders and policy-makers to take clear, concerted and collaborative action. We need people along the whole farm-to-fork process (here’s looking at you retailers, especially) which includes the people who eat food (so, that’s all Australians) to start incorporating small changes into their daily food routines. And it’s not hard!
On the eve of World Environment Day – Happy WED folks! – OzHarvest, in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the UN’s Food Agriculture Organisation (FAO), launched the third annual Think.Eat.Save campaign in Australia. The campaign wants to incite widespread action across the country to have its people do exactly what it states, to think about where the food comes from, to eat considerately and to save rather than waste food.
Following the example set by EU nations such as France, Germany, Netherlands and Austria, the campaign calls on the nation’s leaders to set a target to reduce food waste by 50 per cent by 2025. It seems that they are listening! A cohort of politicians came together in Canberra, ate rescued food and launched 2015 Think.Eat.Save.
So our country's pollies are on board and this is how you can get involved:
Hashtag your heart out with #thinkeatsave
Start saving food by practicing Think.Eat.Save’s simple steps. Download their toolkit
We proudly celebrate the whole crop and all things wonky. And when it comes to our leftovers, we love’em.
Gettin’ wonky with it!