If you were to add up all the uneaten food thrown away in Bangkok alone each year, about 93.5 million kilograms, it would weigh roughly equivalent to 34,670 Asian elephants. In fact every one of us in Southeast Asia wastes up to 11 kilograms of food each year, according to a UN report on the staggering amount of global food waste.
Meanwhile globally, 30 percent to 40 percent of everything grown gets lost between the field and the consumer, according to Achim Steiner of the UN Environment Programme. 198 million hectares of food gets wasted before it even leaves the farm, an area about the size of Mexico. Malaysia wastes 15,000 tons of food annually, or 7.5 football fields worth, and in Indonesia, Jakarta alone generates up to 3,600 tons of food waste per day.
But we’re to blame for much of that waste: Nearly one-fifth of the food we buy ends up in the rubbish heap.
“In industrialised Asia, food waste is recorded as 15 to 20 percent after it reaches the consumer, and this trend is becoming more and more common in a growing number of middle-income countries,” said Hiroyuki Konuma of the Food and Agricultural Organisation.
As with many issues, awareness prompts action, and on Sunday, more than 4,000 Bangkokians gathered on the Rama XIII Bridge for a race to raise public awareness on the dire environmental consequences of so much food wasted, a problem made worse during the past decade by growing cities and booming tourism and retail industries, with hotels and restaurants unwittingly tossing thousands of kilograms of uneaten food each month.
“Runners are natural allies in the movement,” Konuma said, “because they can appreciate the value of the food: its vitamins and minerals, and the amount of energy needed to produce it.”
Blair McBride, a long-distance runner who joined the race and finished in the top 10, said it’s a moral issue that has driven him to consider eating ethically.
“It’s appalling how wasteful and environmentally damaging the global food system is, and how it’s geared toward generating profits for a handful of giant corporations,” he said.
Rotting food emits 3.3 billion tons of greenhouse gases globally per year, making it a major contributor to climate change, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization. While thwarting loss at consumer and retail levels is an uphill battle, changing habits is the first step, say food waste prevention experts.
Creating conscious consumers
With its abundant northern “Rice Bowl of Asia,” Thailand exports more food than it imports, leading to a sense of abundance and undervaluing of food.
“Table waste is ascribed as a disconnect from agriculture,” Konuma said. Last year his organisation looked at how much water is used to grow all that wasted food.
They found it was about as much as the annual flow of Russia’s 3,693-kilometer Volga River.
Poor planning and improper storage compound the Thai habit of leaving uneaten rice on the plate, which makes food waste more acceptable instead of taboo, a taboo experts say would help put a dent in rising loss.
“Right now it’s about social norms. Preventing food waste is not yet associated with being responsible,” said Benjamin Lephilibert, the managing director of a Bangkok-based environmental consulting firm. His company, LightBlue Environmental Consulting, partners with hotels to help them develop more sustainable practices.
In the current hospitality model, high food waste is also a sign of achieving quality control. The most stringent hotel and retail guidelines prohibit the reuse of leftover, unserved foods, including buffet dishes. So to be quality-compliant, it’s all got to go out with the trash.
The retail industry also does nothing to condemn dumping uneaten goods, as it also means they can sell more.
The logic is “waste downstream means higher sales upstream,” according to the US-based National Resources Defense Council.
More reading:
Foodkit: A global anti-food waste campaign toolkit
Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill
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