'Sexy' food upcycling can't solve NZ's waste problem - Stuff.co.nz

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When it comes to solutions for tackling climate change with food waste, upcycling is one that consistently gets a lot of column inches.

It’s easy to see why. Upcycling – the practice of taking discarded food materials and turning them into an edible product – is inventive and modern.

It is also, noted Miranda Mirosa, director of Otago University’s Food Waste Innovation research group, “the first consumer product-focused solution” to food waste.

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Miranda Mirosa with three trolleys' worth of food, less than one household wastes in a year.

“It’s much sexier to be told you can save the world by drinking some beer,” said Mirosa, whose research centre includes an upcycled food lab. She referred to work like that done by Citizen Collective, which makes beer using outdated bread.

But upcycling – to answer a question posed by this very reporter, on this very site, late last year – cannot be the whole answer to the problem of food waste, Mirosa stressed.

Well upwards of 30 per cent of food produced globally goes uneaten, which accounts for about 10 per cent of all manmade greenhouse gas emissions.

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Citizen Collective makes beer from disused bread – but that’s not enough to solve our food waste problem.

New Zealand is part of the problem. According to an audit undertaken by the National Food Waste Prevention Project in 2018, Kiwi households throw away a combined 157,389 tonnes of food a year. That’s enough to fill 271 jumbo jets.

That amount of food, the project estimated, could feed the population of Dunedin for nearly three years – significant when we consider that one in five people in New Zealand experience food insecurity.

Upcycling will never be able to deal with that amount of food waste. And turning one food into another requires processing, which uses energy, which contributes to climate change.

But when upcycling becomes the sexy face of food waste solutions, it leads people to believe that it’s okay to throw out that loaf of bread, because it can just be turned into beer.

In fact, Mirosa said, the focus needs to be on preventing food waste in the first place.

“Although I am really excited about this trend, I really do think this upcycling trend will define the food industry in some sense, it's not going to solve the issue.”

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Composting is a better solution for household food waste like this than upcycling.

Where upcycling had an important role to play was in making use of “unavoidable waste”, she said, or waste that was inherently inedible – things like coffee husks, spent grain (Citizen Collective puts the spent grain from its beer back into bread products) or fruit peels.

If manufacturers embraced upcycling their own unusable products, manufacturing food waste could be significantly reduced.

But, said Mirosa, when it comes to ordinary food consumers “we really need to minimise surplus”.

Gilles Paire

Correctly using your freezer will help minimise food waste.

There are ways of doing this, simple ones. Unsexy ones.

“Shop smarter, cook smarter, eat smarter,” is Mirosa’s mantra.

That means shopping with a list, and not only buying the most beautiful fruits and vegetables (Countdown’s Odd Bunch are a good, and cheap, place to start, as are local farmers’ markets). It means storing food correctly to ensure it stays fresh for as long as possible, and using your freezer smartly.

Don’t cook too many portions, and eat any leftovers.

“Buy things that you’re feasibly going to get through, and if not, know what to do with it,” Mirosa said.

Some food waste is inevitable – nobody’s suggesting we all start eating onion skins or fish bones – but this should ideally be composted, or put in a green bin if you have one.

Bread is New Zealand’s most wasted food item. We throw away 29 million loaves of it per year. That’s a lot of beer.

While fancy, futuristic-sounding newfangled foods might grab the most headlines, and could make a difference at the production side of the waste issue, they’re not going to overcome climate change.

For that, we need to go a little less sexy.

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