About 40% of all food goes uneaten, but 10% of the world’s population are hungry
Source: BBC Follow the Food – https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/follow-the-food/how-to-use-food-waste-for-good/
We are stuck in a catch-22. Growing populations need more food, but we can’t afford to strip any more of the world’s resources to grow it. Have we been sitting on the solution all along?
Farmland already occupies 38% of all land – about five billion hectares’ (19 million sq miles’) worth.
But agricultural areas will need to expand considerably if we are to feed the growing, and increasingly affluent, global population. In our urgency to produce more food, some farming methods are stripping nutrients from the soil, fuelling climate change and driving biodiversity loss. We also risk undermining future generations’ chances to grow food.
Yet, there is a way we could increase the amount of food we produce without having to create any more farmland, grow any more crops or rear more animals. Enormous quantities of edible food are thrown away every day by farmers, suppliers, manufacturers, retailers and ultimately consumers. Could cutting the amount of waste help us feed the world?
While consumers have their own part to play by only buying what they need and making better use of leftovers, every year, an estimated 1.2 billion tonnes of food is wasted – the weight of 10 million blue whales – before even reaching the shops. Food is lost throughout the supply chain, from field to harvest, during processing and in transportation.
In developing countries, technological limitations, along with a lack of labour, finance or proper infrastructure for transportation and storage are the major causes of food loss. In industrialised nations, market prices for crops can encourage waste – if they are too low, farmers may choose not to make additional passes through their fields and products that are less than perfect are often not worth picking as consumers avoid them. Overripe fruit, wonky vegetables or low-quality produce will often end up in landfill or are simply left in the ground.
Every year, 1.2 billion tonnes of food is wasted before even reaching the shops
Reducing food loss and waste is critical to eradicating food insecurity and addressing climate change. The solutions, however, are not always straightforward, leading agricultural scientists to come up with some innovative ideas for how to tackle the problems involved.
How do we prevent waste? One way might be to use robots to automate some of the harvesting process, meaning crops are picked more accurately. But even machines have flaws when it comes to spotting ripe crops. So Stephanie Walker, a crop scientist at New Mexico State University, is experimenting with adapting crops to suit robots’ needs.
In her field laboratory in New Mexico, Walker is using selective breeding to produce chillies that work better with harvesting machinery. The peppers are difficult to pick: the plants are bushy and the fruit sits close to the stem. Green chillies are the hardest of all as they are not yet ripe so are unwilling to let go of the plant.
“Until this year, the New Mexico green chilli has been completely hand harvested because harvester machines broke too many fruit, too many were left on the stem, and plants would often uproot,” says Walker.
After trialling numerous harvesting machines, Walker realised it was the chillies that needed to change. So she bred a new plant, the NuMex Odyssey, a strong, single-stemmed chilli with fruit that sits higher up on the plant, specifically developed for mechanical harvest efficiency.
Once a fruit has been picked, the remaining plant might have little value to a farmer, but some are making use of these agricultural byproducts that would otherwise go to waste, from “ugly fruit” skincare products to textiles made from starch. In the UK and East Africa, insects fed on vegetable waste become high-protein food for animals and humans, and in the US leftover soy from tofu manufacturing is turned into gluten-free flour.
“There’s a $46bn (£34bn) upcycled food product market out there,” says Emma Chow, who leads the Ellen MacArthur Foundation Food Initiative. “We can turn agricultural residues and farm-level byproducts into ingredients, making the most of what we already produce.”
Rice, the world’s most popular crop, is another example where there is considerable potential for using more waste. For every tonne of rice produced, a tonne of straw is grown. Some of it is used as bedding and fodder for livestock, or in building materials, or is ploughed back into the soil as fertiliser, but much of the straw is left to rot or burned in the fields. Rice straw can be processed, however, to produce biogas, providing energy for both domestic and commercial uses. The digested straw also makes a nutritious fertiliser and provides a good substrate for mushroom growing, so farmers can gain an additional income.
“Around 800 million tonnes of rice straw is produced globally each year,” says Patricia Thornley, professor of engineering and applied science at Aston University in Birmingham, UK. “We want to use this to improve the livelihoods of farmers and protect the environment we all share.
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