Food everywhere – going to waste

MALAYSIANS are foodies, through and through. We love our mamak shop and street food fare, our Michelin-starred fine dining and bottomless hotel buffets. And all our festivities revolve around food, of course.

So why do we throw away so much perfectly good, still edible food? And we do this every day.

There were an estimated 17,000 tonnes of food waste generated every day in 2021, according to a study by landfill operator Solid Waste Management and Public Cleansing Corporation (SWCorp).

From this amount, a staggering 4,046 tonnes were still edible food that could have fed some three million people with three meals a day.

A more recent survey conducted by SWCorp of 92 Ramadan bazaars in Putrajaya and Kuala Lumpur revealed that 53 tonnes of garbage are produced daily at these places, and 24% of the food found in that garbage could still be eaten.

These are painful statistics to hear as more and more Malaysians face food insecurity today, and even find it difficult to feed their families daily. We hear stories nowadays of families or university students having only one meal a day or surviving on a loaf of bread for a few days.

And yet we waste food.

Apart from the humanitarian impact, food wastage also has huge economic and environmental costs.

For example, wet, organic waste produces a smelly leachate in rubbish bins and landfills as it breaks down. If this waste is not treated correctly, it can adversely affect the environment and people’s health.

Also, food waste worsens climate change by increasing greenhouse gas emissions when it ends up in landfills. The cost of disposing of food waste is also high, with each Malaysian household spending around RM2,600 a year on it.How is any of this acceptable?

For decades, many NGOs and civil society bodies have urged the government to take urgent action to address this issue.

We have had educational campaigns about food wastage before but, obviously, the message is not getting through. We need to begin such campaigns in the first year of school and carry on throughout the schooling years to create a generation that will habitually not waste food.

We need to get restaurants and food producers involved more, perhaps by offering tax breaks for food saving efforts and penalising wastage when it happens.

And perhaps we should consider penalising us consumers too, especially those of us who have “eyes bigger than our stomachs”, ie, we load our plates and then find we can’t finish the food. Eateries in many countries, especially those offering buffets, are introducing the idea of people paying for food they leave on their plates.

As responsible consumers, we must also play our part by buying only what we need so we don’t have vegetables and fruits rotting in the fridge.

We can learn to freeze leftovers and make another meal out of them – YouTube is full of videos explaining how to maximise groceries while saving money and not wasting food.

Every year during Ramadan, all the newspapers publish heartwarming stories of NGOs and volunteers who go around to the bazaars to save food and feed people in need.

But that’s not enough. We all need to work together all year round to reduce food wastage – the government, food producers, and you and I.