Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaleditions.com/i/122153
greenkeeper T here's a costly problem occurring in many household kitchens around Australia. It's so common and ingrained that most of us don't realise it's happening. It's a widespread practice in restaurant kitchens, too, although it usually occurs in the back alley, out of view of customers. Somewhere deep in our consciousness, far from the rows of perfect, blemish-free bananas that beam from grocery store shelves, and the eye-popping portions that our favourite restaurants plate up, we know what we're doing isn't quite right, but we're not sure how wrong it is either. Look in the average household garbage bin and you'll find the contents are about 40 per cent food. And not just food that is inedible – we're throwing out perfectly good tucker, too. The reasons range from buying too much and not knowing how to use leftovers, to slavishly adhering to 'best before' dates and storing food incorrectly. On the face of it, it might not seem like we're wasting that much, but the reality is another bizarre fact of modern life in a developed country. Experts on the issue of food waste estimate that each Australian household wastes at least $1,036 per year on food they have bought, only to throw away. The figures are even more startling if we consider the total amounts wasted by households in Australia. As a nation we discard four million tonnes of food, costing us $8 billion, every year. And that doesn't include the food that is wasted on the farm. One of the key experts trying to turn this around is Jon Dee, co-founder of Planet Ark and Do Something!, a nonprofit organisation that facilitates social and environmental change. Among the many projects he has initiated is FoodWise, a national campaign to reduce the environmental impact of Australia's food consumption. Jon describes himself as "not your traditional greenie, but very pro-business", so it's not surprising that his team collated Australia's first national food waste statistics, back in 2003, upon which future dollar figures could be based. What Jon has discovered is the majority of people simply don't know how much food, and therefore money, they're throwing away. "When you get people to keep a food diary about how much food they waste, they have no idea what the outcome will be," he says. "So many people whinge about petrol prices, yet they just throw away vast amounts of food, so I find there's a real disconnect with how people are running their household budgets." In addition, a lot of people don't understand how much of our precious resources goes into getting food from paddock to plate. "I grew up in a farming community and I saw how hard farmers worked and how much water, energy and other resources went into growing food," Jon explains. "But it's one of those things that people just don't think about. They don't know where their food comes from or what resources go into producing it." According to the ABC's Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, farmers in the US use about 50 per cent of the country's land and 80 per cent of its fresh water supplies for food production. If the global population swells to nine billion people by 2050 as predicted, "Look in the average household garbage bin and you'll find the contents are about 40 per cent food." 77