FOOD | LOVE | WASTE a study on food waste and its solutions

we are just OBSESSED with food #food 114 252 908 pictures #yummy 37 092 943 pictures #foodporn 31 231 919 pictures #foodie 8 859 032 pictures #foodgasm 6 558 681 pictures $89 millionraised by food companies in the second quarter of 2014 alone. $350 millionraised since the second quarter of 2013, according to Crunchbase, not including food delivery deals.That is the strongest performance of the category in 5 years. On Pinterest, 57% of users discuss food-related topics, the most repinned picture being Garlic Cheesy Bread with 105 362 pin. In 2012, 29% of the general population reported posting photographs of their food online. Millions of food related tweets are posted every week globally, while more than half of UK users log onto Twitter when they are in a restaurant.. source: CB Insights

Yet we globally lose 25 to 33% of food we produce. That's between 1.2 and 2 billion tons. Also, all the food produced in the Sub-Saharan region. 53% of the calories we loose is wasted in cereals. 50% of sh and seafood caught ends up as garbage up to 2.3 million tons a year. 10% of rich countries' greenhouse gas emissions come from growing food that is never eaten. Each of us in the United States and Europe is responsible for trashing between 200 and 400 pounds of completely usable food a year. Farmers create 39% of the food-waste within the EU: they are heavily penalised when not being able to supply enough fruits and vegetables, so they overproduce avoiding the risk. When rejected by the supermarkets - based on non-demand or impossible cosmetic standards - the surplus ends up as landll. But not as compost, mind you.

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Information on food waste only became mainstream recently. With more and more civil associations involved and supermarkets that build their brand around sustainability or charity, dazzling numbers and potential solutions are nally right in front of our eyes. Whether we gather information from statistics, books or apps, there seems to be a way to shift the existing situation by mindfulness and slight tweaks in the way we buy, produce and eat. Just Eat It is a 75-minute documentary lm released this April, about food waste and rescue, bringing together farmers, retailers, inspiring organizations, and consumers. Filmmakers Jen and Grant decided to quit grocery shopping and survive solely on food that was or would have been thrown away. Their decision leads to an interesting journey and uncovers the crazy ways we waste of food, due to our obsession with consumption, expiry labels and perfect-looking vegetables. Tristam Stuart has recently been chosen as one of National Geographic emerging explorers. His 2009 book, Waste - Uncovering the Global Food Scandal is still a breakthrough study on how nutrition is being wasted, both by households and corporate entities throughout the world. After only bite-sized articles and one-o programs, his work provides a deep dive into the current problems and possible solutions, from the farm to the plate and beyond. He is currently working on bringing these ndings to real life with initiatives such as Feeding the 5000 or The Pig Idea.

Love Food, Hate Waste is a campaign launched by theWaste & Resources Action Programme. Aiming to educate British households on better planning and more conscientious consumption, their site is led with practical information on meal and portion planning, recipes and shopping lists. Since the start, they helped two million households reduce their food waste, amounting to savings of almost 300 million and stopping 137,000 tons of food being wasted. The Think, Eat, Save initiative is a partnership between UNEP, FAO and Messe Dsseldorf, supported by the UN Secretary-Generals Zero Hunger Challenge. The site aims to become an extensive and practical resource for information on food waste, including tips and ideas for more mindful consumption. The Community Shop is a members only supermarket selling surplus products from Tesco, Asda and other UK supermarkets at 30% of the original price to people in need. The rst shop opened in 2014, and it is important to realise that these surplus products would have ended up as landll, even though the reasons to discard them are as mundane as seasonal forecasting issues, labelling errors or a short shelf-life.

http://www.treehugger.com/corporate-responsibility/how-one-grocery-store-ghting-food-waste-ugly- produce.html ls lgumes moche :) We throw away over 300 million ton of vegetables and fruits each year, 57% of them because of their look not meeting the standards. French supermarket chain Intermarch - the third biggest in the country asked the rightful question: why do fruits and vegetables have to look like their photoshopped selves? Can we reduce prices and food waste plus help customers eat the healthy amount of fruit and vegetables in the same instant? Buying the produce their suppliers would have normally dumped into landll, they launched the campaign for Inglorious Food. Sold in separate isles, for 30% cheaper then their pretty cousins, these ugly fruits and vegetables sold 1.2 ton average per store. The campaign, fortied by the Inglorious Soups and Juices to demonstrate look are not everything a fruit can have, resulted in a 24% overall store trac increase and reached over 13 million people in a month through the press and social media.

Share food

SPOILER ALERT If all US cattlemen switched to grass-fed production systems, animal protein intake in the average American diet would drop from 75 grams to 29 grams per day. That, plus current levels of plant-protein consumption, would still yield more than the RDA for protein. Restaurants create food surplus on a daily basis and individuals - prompted by fear of expiry or simply bad planning of weekly shopping and cooking - trash incredible amounts of still edible food. Consequently, one of the obvious solutions to diminish waste and feed those in need is to share what we happen to have too much of. Spoiler Alert, a recent vision sprouting from two Massachusetts Institute of Technologys Sloan School of Management students, takes the concept one step forward and concentrates on already spoiled food. They want to connect every major player in the food-supply chain so spoilt food can be seamlessly passed on and recycled by farmers, composters, bio-energy producers. They then convert the waste into less energy- intensive forms of fertilizer and fuel. Zero Percent has been founded to create a more ecient and trustworthy way of connecting the producers of surplus food with the organisations who need it the most. A safe and convenient online food donation marketplace, helping restaurants to move food to nearby soup kitchens and shelters, it has distributed 260K meals in collaboration with 180 dierent non-prot entity..

Elk Groove Local public organizations can help bringing food waste to the attention of people and educate as well. Elk Grove Mayor Gary Davis dubs his citys Community Exchange innovative common sense: through an online platform and community engagement program supported by CropMobster, anyone in the community farmers, food businesses, backyard gardeners can post instant alerts on surplus food and supplies going to waste. The alerts can oer deals, donations, trades for the food and serve around 3.300 people monthly. MEALKU Mealku has found a wonderful way to address the food waste happening in households and lack of time in other ones. A step towards real collaborative consumption, people share home-made food within the cooperative, even if they have never met in real life before. No money exchanges hands - you earn and spend credits and the previous testing of the kitchens involved is rigorous. "The ip side of not wasting is connecting." - D'Cruz-Young, Mealku Piqniq Ever got criticized for posting too much food photo on Facebook? Try Piqniq, the app created to share food visually, and more importantly also in real life. With its help you can eortlessly organise food groups at the workplace, sharing surplus food, delighting colleagues with home cooking and building happier communities too. Food brings people together. When you share it. - Piqniq

Philadelphias Federal Donut only makes delicious chicken, doughnut and coee. Judged by the pictures, they must taste great. For their dishes they only use specic parts of the antibiotic-free, vegetable fed chicken they buy as a whole, so they throw away more than 450 kg fresh bone and back every week. Philadelphia is the poorest large city and one of the hungriest Congressional Districts in America. However cooking up these leftover chicken parts and give away to the hungry seems like a logical solution, it doesnt really eect the grand scheme of things. Broad Street Ministrys Hospitality Collaborative is a place for the vulnerable of the city to nd a delicious meal - served at a table - a change of clothes and community to build and to belong. Federal Donuts answer is to launch a new, crowd- founded restaurant, the Rooster Soup Co., where they do what they do best: cooking delicious chicken to everyone. Eliminating the food waste, they also donate 100% of the prots to the Broad Street Hospitality Collaborative. The company estimates their rst years prot to be $50,000 that can supply 24,272 meals to guests in need, growing to $100,000 annually after ve years.

grow your own

Back to the roots Alejandro Velez and Nikhil Arora became fascinated by how oyster mushrooms grow on recycled coee ground in the last year of graduate school. Saying goodbye to their future in cubicles, they launched the growing kit that produces gourmet mushrooms in less than two weeks and proved to be a great way to teach kids about producing their own food as well as making them eat the result with enthusiasm. Their second product is a self-cleaning sh tank, housing a tiny hydroponic herb garden. "Our mission is to make food personal again through the passionate development of tools that educate and inspire, one family at a time." - Back to The Roots Sprouts.io Sprouts.io makes hydroponic gardening real easy and beautiful too. The assembled kit saves customers the legwork of guring out how to set up their own hydroponics system and the sleek design would adorn any contemporary home. Releasing nourishing vapor on the plants, it uses 98% less water and 60% less fertilizer than conventional methods, yet yields 6 times as much produce than a similar sized traditional pot. Imagine if people in your neighbourhood grew food in small quantities, We could change the way good, fresh food is produced and distributed in cities. Wired

Founder Britta Riley built the rst window farm in 2009 in her 5th oor Brookly apartment window. What started as an experiment in urban gardening, today is a community of more than 42 000 people from Singapore to Senegal to Brooklyn. The solution is saving space, water and nutrition, thanks to the hydroponics food growing system. Nutrient-spiked water is pumped up from a reservoir at the base of the system and trickles down from planter to planter, bathing the roots along the way. Roots sit, not in soil, but in a Root Nest made of coconut hair, rice hulls, clay pellets, infused with symbiotic microscopic life. A system that has been featured featured at the American Museum of Natural History WINDOW GARDENS Buildings designed around gardens The Spiral Tower, designed by Philipp von Bock, is a family friendly eco tower designed for Berlin. Apartments are stacked in opposite directions in a criss- cross pattern, leaving open spaces for garden terraces. This creative design allows each apartment to have its own private garden terrace, allowing families to have both the suburbs and the city. And Berlin is not the only city gardens that reach to the sky. Think Milans Bosco Verticale, the urban forest by MAD Architects and how the concept of vertical farming - entire skyscrapers dedicated to produce crops, vegetables and even poultry and pork.

Community - garden - produce Gardening is not only the best way to get local food, its also ritual, rule system and companionship. Urban orchards and community gardens are popping up all over the world and make parks into fruit bearing groves, empty spaces between houses into green jungles. These gardens help to preserve biodiversity, operate as learning centers and connect with what we eat in a deeper level. Even if you wont produce enough tomatoes to keep your family satised throughout the year, learning what it takes to take home a basketful of it will make you think twice about throwing anything out. They are also a wonderful way of reusing waste in the form of compost and thanks to working next to each other, urban gardens shape communities, camaraderie and better bartering relationships.

innovate

When we waste food, we waste resources. Water, GRAIN, SOIL Sources: FoodWasteNews Cornell News *Livestock water use is water associated with livestock watering, feedlots, dairy operations, and other on-farm needs. Livestock includes dairy cows and heifers, beef cattle and calves, sheep and lambs, goats, hogs and pigs, horses, and poultry. Other livestock water uses include cooling of facilities for the animals and animal products such as milk, dairy sanitation and wash down of facilities, animal waste-disposal systems, and incidental water losses. 1 liter of milk = 1 000 liter of water* 1 hamburger = 16 000 liter of water 1kg chicken meat = 3 500 liter of water 1kg rice = 1 912 liter of water From all the crops being produced, only 8% is aimed at human consumption. When feeding livestock produced grain, we trade already existing nutritional value: chicken meat: 4:1 input energy vs. protein output beef cattle: 54:1 input energy vs. protein output eggs: 26:1 input energy vs. protein output Cattle and pig production compacts soil structure and destroys vegetation. A not so fun fact? A grazing cow leaves 2 liter urine to an area of about 0.4 m2. Such an amount burns vegetation and is often toxic to plant roots which cannot immediately recover. So, how to save both?

BETTERPROCESSES Under European laws, feeding most food waste - such as catering waste - to pigs is banned, contributing to: more mindless food waste, driving farmers out of business due to the emerging price of feeding crops, destroying forests to make place for unnecessary, surplus grain production and growing greenhouse gas emission. The Pig Idea aims to change the legislation, by rearing pigs at Stepney City Farm, solely on food waste, then organising a feast of 5 000 free portion of food from said pigs, cooked up by 7 of Londons best restaurants. The huge Trafalgar square event was sponsored by the mayor of London and hopefully is a step into the direction where pigs can reclaim the role they historically play in human households: the most ecient way to reuse food waste. In Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, laws encourage using food waste to feed pigs. In the same time, there are steps to make insect-derived feed approved within the EU, another interesting direction in more sustainable feeding of our livestock. Hampton Creeks Food looks for a better egg substitute since 2011. Since then they had launched Just Mayo, distributed at Whole Foods, cheaper than the competitor vegan products and very often proclaimed better than actual mayonnaise. Their second product, Just Cookies cookie dough is on the selves since February and they are currently working on a product to mimic scrambled eggs. The products are not only interesting for the growing number of vegetarian and vegan consumers: their equivalent of an egg costs exactly half of the real thing and doesnt involve any animal torture. It is also better for the heart and results in a smaller carbon footprint than the production and consumption of real eggs. The company has closed a $23 million from Horizon Ventures, and environment conscientious funders, such as Bill Gates, Peter Thiel and Khosla Ventures back them. sustainableingredients

liquidnutrition Soylent has already gained signicant media coverage. Robert Rhinehart and his team developed the drinkable food to help people with busy lifestyles still have the optimum intake of every nutrient, while avoiding the disproportionate costs of cooking and eating healthily. A new Finnish competitor is Ambronite, a drink created from 20 organic ingredients, aiming to provide a full meal within only a small package. While these food substitutes are not necessarily designed to be eaten at every meal - sometimes you just got to bite into a juicy steak - they can answer questions of feeding the poor in the third world - easier logistics, lower prices - as well as help to maintain a less wasteful household and saving time when needed. Wiselyusedwaste And if there needs to be waste there should be better ways to work with it. WISErg, a bio- tech company processes scraps from meat, seafood, deli, and produce department, and turns them into organic fertilizers that is then sold to commercial farmers and retail customers. The Harvester also collects information about the food scraps so businesses can better manage their inventory. They raised Series B round of $5 million from private investors and keep on developing the technology: unlike traditional composters that simply concentrate on decomposing material, the Harvester uses a patent-pending oxidative conversion process, extracting valuable nutrients from food scraps before they become waste.

where do we go from here?

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