Uncomfortable food waste statistics
One of my neighbours recently shared a pile of beautiful broccoli with me from Hamilton Farmers Market. She’d arrived at the market almost as it was closing and a stallholder had generously loaded her up with his surplus.
I was a happy recipient, but there is only so much broccoli that one person can eat so I turned some of it into soup and tucked it away in the freezer.
A few days later, a friend gave me a bag of strawberry guavas. Cue a quick search for a method for guava jelly or paste. Likewise, I was at the well-stocked seafood counter at Pak‘n Save, Clarence St, the other day with a Thai fish curry in mind. I was drawn to a tray of super-fresh shark fillets; “they came in this morning,” said a staff member as she weighed them. Underrated (could not be considered woke), at $25.99/kg the shark was way less than premium species and spot-on for the curry.
I mention these squirrel-like tendencies because I am returning to the topic of food waste and my particular obsession with not binning – or sidestepping – perfectly edible edibles. On the eve of Mother’s Day, a nod to my mother for passing on some valuable culinary skills.
I’m triggered by some uncomfortable statistics: a new report from the New Zealand Food Network (NZFN), of a 42% increase in demand for food support in 2023 compared with 2022, and a whopping 83% increase from 2021. NZFN is the country’s largest not-for-profit food supply and distribution organisation.
Its new figures run alongside the welldocumented tally of our national food waste, 130,000 tonnes annually. It is further estimated that 60% of that food going to landfill is edible and individual households waste $1510 worth of food each year.
It doesn’t add up. On the one hand some of us – commercially and domestically – are dumping food, and on the other hand there is an increase in the number of people who simply don’t have enough to put on the table. The NZFN survey noted that a third of clients recorded were seeking food support for the first time.
So this is written to commend the good work done by all food rescue organisations, food banks and similar, and to put the case again for not tossing things as they start to look a bit jaded. We can all at least help peg back the annual waste bill, even one head of broccoli at a time. And without wanting to be preachy, there is some personal satisfaction from the impact on your own household budget, and the knock-on effect for the planet.
If you’ve got plenty in your cupboards, it is humbling to meet those who don’t. When the Hamilton food rescue and redistribution organisation Go Eco Food Rescue (Kaivolution) was first established, I followed the rehoming of some boxes of top-quality lettuces for a Waikato Times story. The lettuces had come from a local grower and without the rescue team’s work they’d have likely gone to stock food. Instead the van driver that day took them to several Hamilton social support agencies.
At one drop-off, in a community hall, a young mother told us it would be a pleasure to give her kids a bowl of fresh greens for dinner. It would be their first in a while. Another lettuce was picked up by a girl who’d called into the hall on her way home from school. She said it would make her mum very happy.
Go Eco Food Rescue continues to help feed people in the region, saving goods from landfill and reducing carbon emissions. In the year to July 2023, it reported that it redistributed 379.621kg of food from multiple Waikato suppliers.
Meanwhile, back home, and faced with floppy carrots and faded greens, there are endless ways to zhuzh them up for another round. The website lovefoodhatewaste.co.nz is one of my favourite go-tos for inspiration. This waste minimisation project, supported by 52 councils nationwide, is also a partner in the newly released Food Rescue Kitchen television series.
The show challenges Kiwi chefs including Karena and Kasey Bird, Michael Van de Elzen and Peter Gordon to create three-course feasts made only from rescued ingredients. Former Hamiltonian Chantelle Nicholson, nowadays a multiaward winning chef in London, has been roped in for an episode too.
Presenter Naomi Toilalo chooses the chefs’ ingredients from crates of rescued items. She also offers practical tips for home cooks on reducing waste. So far, we’ve watched the reinvention of brown bananas, discarded mushrooms, soft carrots, squishy tomatoes, “too big” leeks, fisheries by-catch (sole, not shark), and more.
Toilalo says best-before dates, over-ordering and mislabelling are among the reasons for food being rejected. In the first episode, NZFN’S chief executive, Gavin Findlay, mentioned two bins of carrots that didn’t make the cut because they were considered to be “too orange”. He said we’ve become obsessed with aesthetics equalling quality, this inevitably leads to waste, and we should be less fussy. It’s hard to argue with that.
So, as I write, it’s close to dinner time and I’m about to turn the last of a roast leg of lamb into an old-school cottage pie. I cooked the roast for guests a day or so before, and some of them also had the broccoli soup from the freezer for lunch.
With the roast, I’d earlier stripped off the leftover meat and instead of boiling the bone for stock I dispatched it with two of the guests as a “rescued” treat for their rescue dog. They sent a video of her excitedly chomping on the bone, and then scurrying off to bury it for later pleasure. It felt like a win-win with every skerrick of the roast accounted for, in one way or another.
Food Rescue Kitchen screens Saturdays on Three, at 7pm, and streams on Threenow.