Consumer habits can make or break a food discipline and in these times of the preposterous volume of food wastage globally, every effort at educating people to move away from a throwaway lifestyle makes a difference.
The Ministry of Climate Change and Environment’s upcycled iftar using edible food that is usually wasted due to its appearance came as a wake-up call. Using under-utilised cuts of meat and overripe fruits to create delicious dishes, the ministry’s message to consumers and food suppliers was clear — much of the food we discard and waste is entirely edible, so please, think twice before discarding it.
In Australia, for example, A$8 billion (Dh29.4 billion) worth of edible food is thrown every each year because it doesn’t look good enough. This obsession with attractive looking produce comes at a staggering cost to the environment because every grain, fruit and leaf of food that is grown uses up precious resources of water, energy and land.
There are also the added costs of making that produce available to all such as storage, transportation, distribution. Add up the costs and you will realise why throwing away even a single tomato or a potato just because it has a slight scratch or a dent, and despite which it is entirely worthy of a great recipe, is unacceptable as a consumer whim. In the UAE, such and other whims, cost the economy around Dh13 billion annually as food wastage.
The silver lining is that increasingly, many entities in the UAE are pledging to help the country move speedily towards the 2020 United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 12 and reduce food wastage by 50 per cent. Every UAE resident needs to make a similar pledge.
