A Senior Research Fellow from RMIT University has prompted the question of whether society needs to rethink its food consumption habits at Christmas.
Dr Bhavna Middha, who has studied food waste extensively, said Christmas feasts can accelerate this kind of wastage.
“Entertainment, parties and eating out are front and centre as we approach the holiday season,” she said.
“We all like to cook, buy and take large amounts of food in this festive season, both as hosts and guests and many people think it is better to have too much food than not enough.
“But our shared practices need to be put under scrutiny, as they can often lead to extravagant food waste.”
Dr Middha called food wastage an “endemic issue” in Australia, with 7.6 million tonnes of food being wasted in this country per year.
Not only does this have severe environmental consequences, the financial burden is also rather high.
“Reducing food waste could save the average family between $2,200 to $3,800 AUD per year,” she said.
“But merely informing householders about food waste is not an adequate strategy to bring about change in everyday routines and activities.”
Advice from Dr Middha includes:
– Stop over-catering: we need to rethink how much food we supply and to accept that the food should be finished or suitably distributed by the end of events.
– Limit bulk-buying: structural issues such as price gouging by supermarkets as well as how everyday convenience is constructed through bulk buying needs to be investigated to determine how bulk buying is reduced beyond special times.
– Understand food longevity: we need a better understanding of what kind of food ages well or badly in storage and use foods before they reach their recommended best before dates.
Research conducted by RMIT found that 17 per cent of fridges in Australian households were too cold or too warm to store food appropriately.
“This means that the food we buy and store, fresh or leftover, is prone to wastage, especially if the fridge is inefficient,” Dr Middha said.
“These findings point to larger questions of relationships between food provisioning, eating and refrigerators and how these (mis)connections may be contributing to global food waste.”
