Blumer warns against needless food waste
TV’s Surreal Gourmet among those pushing for a waste-free, circular economy at conference
When it is time to scrape leftovers and the odds and ends from the cooking process into the garbage, Bob Blumer likes to imagine he is under surveillance.
“Every time I go to throw something out, I stop and I think about it for a second,” he said. “And you know what, that last eighth of the onion can be used for something.”
And so the end of an onion and the bottom from a bell pepper find their way into another dish down the road — a fried rice, soup, or a frittata.
The host of popular Food Network shows such as The Surreal Gourmet, Glutton for Punishment, and World’s Weirdest Kitchens, will be in Vancouver this week for a two-day conference presented by Metro Vancouver and Zero Waste Canada.
A Future Without Waste: The Journey to a Circular Economy — Nov. 8 and 9 — is packed with presentations and discussions about creating a circular economy through materials and design innovation, business transformation, and preventing food loss and waste.
Blumer will appear in his role as an ambassador for Second Harvest, Canada’s largest food rescue organization, dedicated to diverting good food that might otherwise be wasted to people in need.
His goal is to help people break wasteful habits in the same colourful way he tackles all his projects, with a little performance art.
“I like to give people creative solutions for using stuff they would ordinarily throw out,” he said.
In a live performance for Moses Znaimer’s Idea City, Blumer emptied the contents of a typical bag of kitchen garbage onto the stage and made “garbage pizza” from scruffy pepper trim, potato and cauliflower, plus a few items that had passed the use-by date.
“You’re not going to save the world by rescuing this one little bit of bell pepper, but how you do the little things, is how you do everything,” he tells the audience. “A huge amount of food is wasted through the whole supply chain from the farm to the table,” he notes, while cleaning the pot he just used to make soup from his Halloween pumpkin.
“More than one-third of all the food grown is never eaten, and of that, 40 per cent is wasted at home,” he said.
But what we throw away matters. Food and compostable organics that make it to our landfills produce methane, a very potent greenhouse gas.
Metro Vancouver banned organics from the waste stream in 2015, but estimates that they still make up 30 per cent of everything we send to the landfill.
Of course, food waste occurs at every point in the value chain, starting on the farm, where there is often overproduction, as well as during transport and even retail display, said Lori Nikkel, CEO of Second Harvest.
A huge source of food waste occurs when stores over-order, which they do to ensure that produce is always piled high.
People will walk right by a produce shelf with only two heads of lettuce in it, because it doesn’t offer the opportunity to pick the best of the best, which is what Canadian shoppers expect, she said. A shopper from a different era might well have sprinted to that lettuce, just to make sure she got one.
“We need to collectively agree that we should measure the cost of waste and surplus,” said Nikkel. “There will be a significant social and environmental impact if we can divert it to people, and a huge positive impact on business.”
A detailed study of Canada’s $31-billion food waste problem by Second Harvest and Value Chain Management International is due later this year.
The conference also features:
Miniwiz founder Arthur Huang, an award-winning engineer and architect who specializes in repurposing post-consumer waste into building materials.
Gerd Leonhard, a futurist and consultant on business and ethics to more than 200 companies, including Google, Roche, Cisco and KPMG.
Leyla Acaroglu, the developer of the Disruptive Design Method and founder of the award-winning experimental educational initiative The UnSchool of Disruptive Design.