As I got all my ingredients out to make chicken liver pâté, I cut open the bag of organic livers, once gorgeous and fresh from my fabulous butcher Ethical Farmers, and realised i’d left them in the fridge way too long. $10.80 down the drain: But it’s more than that. It’s the environmental impact, it’s the thought of how many satisfied people that I would have fed, the fact that these are parts of an animal raised so carefully and well, the nutrition lost and of course, it’s the guilt. One of the most powerful images i’ve seen recently is this one. Amazing, no?
So, to that point, i felt it was time to do away with waste. I made a list and popped it up on the fridge. Every time we throw away food in this house now, because we left it too long to eat or to cook with, it’s going on the shame list! To further motivate myself, I turned to the amazing food rescue heroes, OzHarvest, for some hard hitting facts about food wastage both here and globally. Here just five of a long list of shocking statistics they share on their site.
- Dumping a kilo of grain fed beef wastes the 50,000 litres of water it took to produce that meat (yet another reason to choose a far more sustainable grass fed beef). Throwing out a kilo of white rice will waste 2,385 litres of water, and wasting a kilo of potatoes costs 500 litres of water !
- In Australia one million children go to school without breakfast or bed without dinner every day and two million people rely on food relief in Australia at some point every year
- 3.28 million tonnes of food is driven to landfill in Australia each year.
- Australians waste close to 3 million tonnes of food per annum, or 136 kilos per person per annum. It equates to a whole bag of shopping out of every 5, or 20%!
- All the world’s nearly one billion hungry people could be lifted out of malnourishment on less than a quarter of the food that is wasted in the rich countries. ALL.
You can read many more shocking facts here.
Meanwhile, what if we all started a list on the fridge? Nothing fancy as you can see! With your kids you could set “waste free week” challenge, with a family treat for each week that is waste free!
Shall we start a movement? I’m always a fan of what happens when many become aware and ACT in a positive way to make a difference! Goosebumps. Let’s get more creative with what’s left over. Let’s make sure we don’t let especially meat or fish go bad, because that’s lives that went completely in vein. Let’s finally start that compost bin. Let’s serve a little less so we finish it and save the rest, rather than scraping food into a bin. Let’s all create one tiny piece of change at home, to create a big load of change in the world.
