Food
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Do we want to throw food away?

Nobody wants to throw food away. And yet one in three foodstuffs does not end up at its destination, in our stomachs, but in the bin.

Food waste is common across all social classes. More or less spoiled food is regularly retrieved from pretty much every fridge and thrown away in the garbage can.

There are many reasons for this: the hustle and bustle of everyday life, haphazard shopping, the charm of special offers and bulk packs...

The extent of waste

Suppose there was a fictitious country in which all the food was grown that is produced but never eaten because it is not good enough to sell, spoils in transit or ends up in the garbage can uneaten.

This country would be almost as big as Russia [2]. If we wanted to walk across it, we would have to take a year. This country would consume four times as much water as the USA: 250 km³ [2]. And it would be the third largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, after the USA and China [2].

Around 2 billion people could be fed with this food produced for free. Twice as many as are currently undernourished.

Let's take a quick look back at our everyday reality to see where our contribution could lie. In the EU alone, 80 percent or 47 million tons of household food waste could be avoided [3].

Where waste occurs

The lion's share of food waste is attributable to private households. Every household in the EU throws away 123 kg of the food they buy every year [3]. However, there is an urban-rural divide: urban households throw away far more than rural households [4]. Youngerpeople are much more wasteful with food than older generations.

Bread and baked goods top the negative hit list of discarded food, followed by vegetables and fruit. Dairy products and eggs take third place. They are followed by meat and fish [4].

However, out-of-home catering also has a significant impact, for example through buffet and plate leftovers in restaurants or unserved food in commercial kitchens. In the EU, they account for 12 percent of 88 million tons of food waste [5].

Food waste in retail is responsible for 5 percent. There is room for improvement when it comes to passing on food to social institutions: in Austria, for example, 6 percent is currently passed on [3].

But there are also severe losses at the beginning of the value chain. In Central European fields, one in three carrots is left lying around because it is not aesthetically pleasing. A Swiss study also shows how incomplete the chain of complete utilization is, with the result that only 34 (!) out of 100 harvested potatoes are eaten.

And to add one more thing: let's imagine a herd of 230,000 cattle for a moment. This gigantic herd is slaughtered for nothing every year (!) in Germany, only to ultimately become food waste.

We cannot be indifferent to food waste, neither ethically, ecologically nor socially. Curbing this waste is an important lever in climate protection. Last but not least, we are also harming ourselves economically. Every Austrian household throws away €300 a year - in the form of food that is bought but not eaten.

What we can do about it

Many initiatives are now dedicated to the fight against waste. Here are a few examples:

• Austrian boards
• Foodsharing" platform Germany and Austria
• Start-up "Too good to go" Germany and Austria