Let’s Rethink Food Waste
Did that headline make you cringe? Or maybe you are already familiar with the catchy food waste slogan?
Navigating the food demands of a growing population has pushed us to consider how to make more food and more efficiently, but it’s also prompting a closer examination of food loss along supply chains. The equivalent of 145 billion meals end up as food waste in the United States every year. What if we were better equipped to tackle increased demand for food, not by producing more food, but by wasting less of it?
Or, even using the parts of food we don’t usually eat to build new food options?
Whether you’ve noticed or not, the trash to table model is already underway. From pulp chips or upcycled noodles at your local grocery store, to animal feed for your dogs or chickens, to households across the nation using vegetable scraps in soups and muffins, there’s a growing trend to discover food waste and create a viable use for it.
But what about the parts of plants that obviously contain energy that we don’t eat? Yes, even those wasted bits could be used to grow more nutrients. Research is underway to determine if there is a feasible way of using fermentation to turn parts of plants that we don’t typically use for human consumption into more edible and nutrient dense meals.
It’s created an interesting question about measuring food waste. Technically, do edible parts of plants that we don't normally eat count as food waste? Or only things we generally eat?
Calculating Food Waste
There is no perfect supply chain. You can find wasted food at every point in every chain. Sometimes produce rots before it is even harvested or it is simply left unused. Sometimes food spoils in transit because it wasn’t kept at the right temperature or there was a shipping delay. In other cases waste occurs because of inadequate packaging. And, a large portion of food is purchased, cooked and thrown in the trash or sits and spoils in a refrigerator or pantry.
Food waste is measured in a few ways. You can examine pounds of food brought in versus pounds of food brought out. For example, a school or a restaurant can calculate how many pounds of food they purchase in a specified timeframe, how many meals are served, and how much food is taken out to the trash. In other cases a food product is broken up into units and might include anything from juice, pulp, stems, skin, or leaves. The ratio of units used to units unused determines the percentage of food waste for the given product and process.
For the most part, we think of food waste in terms of what could end up on our plate, but doesn’t, like broccoli stems, potato peels, the hard to debone parts of the chicken, and vegetable ends. Or, the food that is on our plate that gets scraped into the trash when dinner is over. The stuff we were too full to finish, but didn’t see any point in saving for later.
In the United States, it’s believed that 30-40% of food is lost every year. It’s a huge percentage! And, the planting, harvesting, processing, transporting and distributing required a lot of energy that we also count as being wasted. The issue is a global one that is bringing many countries together to work on real solutions to combat the complex dynamics. Recently, $14.8 million in grant money was allotted to an Illinois-Singapore research partnership hoping to take existing fermentation processes to the next level and make some of our inedible food delicious and nutritious.
Expanding the Food Waste Equation
This research aims to tackle food waste from a whole different angle. What about the parts of the plants that hardly make it out of the field or off the farm? The husks, stems, seedpods, and stalks that were once part of the plant, but that we won’t find in a grocery store. They are also made up of cells and many of those cells contain sugars that could be used to cultivate more nutrients, or food.
Usually these leftovers or byproducts are considered harvest debris. And, we tend not to consider it as wasted food. Much of it is tilled into the soil as a source of nutrients, used to feed livestock, or composted. These byproducts are not usually factored into food waste equations because there isn’t a large chance that they will end up on our dinner plates or cutting boards.
Much like the concept of cell cultivated meat, precision fermentation aims to reengineer plant cells by using the existing sugar molecules to grow proteins, minerals and vitamins. If successful, it could expand the scope of how we measure food waste to include debris. Unused debris from harvested crops, that could have been cultivated into a new more nutrient dense food source, would equal meals lost.
On the other hand, if science accomplishes what it aims to do in building a new safe, tasty, nutritious, and affordable food source then perhaps this is the bonus food option we’ve been looking for. Food that is deemed inedible but that still contains usable energy would be elevated and enhanced to become usable for human consumption.
While precision fermentation of this capacity is still a long way off, it certainly prompts us to consider how we define and accurately measure wasted food. If it could be made edible and we are not using it, is it part of the food waste problem?
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