Tackling food waste begins with us, our fridge … and imperfect rotis
• While many people in SA go hungry, a mountain of edibles is dumped every year thanks to a widespread culture of indifference to the realities of poverty
My grandmother, Thayanayagee Pillay, was a formidable woman. She lived through the great influenza epidemic, both world wars and apartheid. She was a phenomenal chef who fearlessly fed the treason trialists in 1957 on meagre donations. Nelson Mandela called her one of the brightest culinary stars he knew.
When I was a child, she would regale me with wartime stories — how her family of eight were rationed down to two cubes of sugar, 400g of flour and two eggs per week. She lived through times of great scarcity, so she valued everything and wasted nothing.
She loved the George Bernard Shaw saying, “There is no sincerer love than the love of food.” And I can honestly say I “sincerely” love food as a result of her amazing cooking.
Food is a golden thread connecting every facet of Indian culture. If we weren’t cooking or eating, we were thinking about what to cook. We celebrate everything with food from Diwali to Eid and Christmas.
And yet I have to confess that unlike my grandmother who never let anything go to waste, when I open my fridge, I am ashamed to see how many furry Movember-looking fruit and vegetables stare back at me.
Instead of valuing everything, I am unravelling that golden thread, discarding the essentials I was taught to value and love.
Our relationship with food seems to have changed over time. In SA, the food system is flawed and filled with absurdities, our food wastage is colossal and we haemorrhage food throughout the supply chain.
In a land where our identities are tethered to our cultures and where traditions matter so much that we fight to keep them alive, why do we underappreciate and devalue food?
We talk about heritage (of which food is a part) and yet we waste more than 10 megatonnes of food a year (210kg a person a year), at an estimated value of R61.5bn.
Picture yourself in the FNB Stadium packed to capacity. Now replace each person with a huge wheelie bin filled with edible food. Now fill six more stadiums of the same size. That is 10 megatonnes of food and it could feed more than 11-million hungry South Africans.
The scary thing about food waste is how much of it we don’t see. When last did you buy a sandwich that was made with the end slice of the loaf? Where have all those bread ends gone?
Maybe we should be turning our bread ends into scrumptious bread-and-butter pudding for the 3.3-million children who go to school hungry.
Another issue that really “grates my carrot” is our need for perfect-looking food. Tonnes of fruit and vegetables that do not look perfect are discarded before they even leave the farm.
My first experience of this was when I was a teenager learning to roll rotis with my gran. To roll a round roti requires the right technique, practice and patience. I sucked at rolling round rotis — mine were always square and sometimes even triangular.
One day, left to my own rotirolling devices, I sneakily used a round bowl and cut them into perfect circles before discarding the off-cuts of dough. I sat back and awaited praise.
What I got instead was a look of disappointment that crushed my soul. My gran found my hidden off-cuts, rolled a perfectly square roti, cooked it and made me eat the square and the round roti. “Is there a difference?” she asked. Absolutely not. So why the need for perfect food?
Of the 10 megatonnes we waste, almost half of that (44%) is fruit and vegetables. I dare you to take back your power and buy that carrot that looks like Donald Trump.
The shitake mushrooms really hit the fan when we think of all the energy, water, soil and human power that goes into producing food.
It is estimated that the energy lost due to food wasted in a year could power Johannesburg for four months.
We need to recognise and acknowledge that we have a food waste problem. We need to change our attitude towards food back to valuing everything and wasting nothing.
For the longest time, I had no cooking clue what the dates on food meant. Sell by, use by, best before … and, in my case, goodbye when tossing out good food because of uncertainty. So let’s clarify the confusion.
“Sell by” is for retailers – when to get a product off their shelves. “Use by” is for consumers — when it should be eaten (although it does not necessarily mean it will make you sick past that date). “Best before” is a suggestion (I bet you did not know that) and refers to the date by which the product might not retain specific qualities.
More important than date labels is “trust yourself” and use your senses. You and I were designed and built to sniff out what is bad for us. Look, smell, lick and taste a little before chucking out a food item.
We have a huge food waste problem in our country and our planet cannot sustain it. Luckily, many of us don’t have to survive on wartime rations for now or stretch our pantries to feed freedom fighters, but six stadiums filled with wasted food suggests we need to become “food waste fighters”.
Think honestly, with no judgment, prejudice or ego about your contribution to the food waste crisis. Don’t talk about it or share it — just picture it and then use all the food in your fridge. Viva square rotis! Long live leftovers!
Pillay is WWF SA SASSI manager. This is an edited version of a talk she gave at the Living Planet Conference.