Food waste at Christmas

Christmas is near and in our kitchens we are already preparing Christmas lunch or the Christmas Eve dinner (according to the family traditions). But we are sure that we will consume all the food products we have bought?

The FAO estimates that every year around a third of world food gets wasted. According to data from the campaign “Food We Want” the majority of the waste happens within the home, where on average every person throws in the bin around half a kg of food…two hundred kg per year! Think not only about the economic squandering that such a waste produces but also about the environmental resources that we have used to produce food that no one consumes.

The numbers of European food waste are staggering: 89 millions tons of wasted food, which have itself produced 170 million tons of warehouse gasses.

The campaign “Food We Want” have been financed in the last years by the European Union and has been active in 8 Countries in the World (Italy, Spain, Poland, Portugal, UK, Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania) wanted to sensitize people about the problem of food waste, promoting via 3 videos some simple but effective behaviors.

The first suggestion, maybe the most important one of this campaign (and one that can be useful to solve many other health issues that we have already talked about in this blog) it is to lower the portion of food we prepare. If it still remains some food on the table, we recommend you to reuse leftover food to prepare delicious dishes in the following days (there are tens of books containing recipes made by reuse food); to freeze it and consume it in at a later time; to store fruit and vegetables properly in the fridge; to pay attention to the expiration date of food products.

Little precautions, but that can make the difference. And this things have even more sense during the Christmas holidays when, you know, people love to exaggerate with the food to put on their table.

It is also true that the tendency of last Christmas, as emerged from Ixe and Coldiretti [NDR: Italian institutions, which analyse data about Italy] there have been less food waste: we hope to continue on this track and to adopt more and more virtuous behaviors both during holidays and the rest of the year.