Dapur Pulih - But Why?

We generate about 15, 000 tonnes of food and kitchen waste every day.

That is enough to fill 7.5 football fields[1]. Of this amount, about 1, 700 tonnes could have been eaten[2].

And that is just in Malaysia.

Around the world, roughly a third of edible food meant for human consumption is lost or wasted[3]. That is about 1.3 billion tonnes a year.

But why does any of this matter?

POVERTY

Many Malaysians live in poverty.

5.85 million people[4], to be exact.

That's 20% of the population. One in every five of us.

We believe that it is possible to reduce food wastage and alleviate poverty at the same time. Firstly, by re-channelling surplus food to those who struggle to make ends meet. The second way is less direct. Food prices depend partly on how much food people are buying. The more people buy, the higher the prices. If we are less wasteful, we will buy only what we need. Food prices will go down and provide relief for poor people.

Malaysian poverty is only the tip of the iceberg.

There are 842 million people suffering from chronic hunger right now [5].

This means that one in every eight people will go to bed hungry tonight. And we’re not talking about its-dinnertime-let’s-eat hunger here. Today alone, about 13, 500 children will die due to hunger-related causes [6].

Food wastage is one of the major causes of the global hunger problem [7]:

The world produces enough to feed the entire human population, but third of that is never eaten;
We admit that the food you choose not to throw into your kitchen bin in Subang will not miraculously fly over to hungry children in Somalia;
But as explained earlier (in #1), food prices depend on how much food people are buying. When we buy more than we need, prices will be higher than they need to be. When something unexpected happens, such as a crop failure or a hike in oil prices, the already high prices of food can be pushed even higher [8].

HUNGER

CLIMATE CHANGE

Food production contributes to higher levels of greenhouse gases (GHGs):

Deforestation is needed for agricultural land space[9];
Cows fart a lot, and the methane from there is 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide[10];
Worse still, the nitrous oxide released in rice cultivation is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide[11];
The processing and delivery stages also leave a carbon footprint. For instance, through emissions from transportation, refrigeration and cooking.

By wasting food, we pile an unnecessary burden to our already struggling, GHC-filled, atmosphere. We make the massive problem of climate change[12] even worse

True, your personal decision to waste less food, in itself, will not change much.

True, our best efforts here at Dapur Pulih may not amount to very much, compared to the global scale of these problems.

Even so, we should still ask ourselves

in light of the devastating effects of climate change,

in light of the 842 million people struggling to have enough to eat,

in light of the many million Malaysians who earn too little to pay all their bills,

and the connection between these problems and food wastage,

are we showing the right attitude in the way we treat perfectly edible food?

ATTITUDE

[1] The Star, 5 June 2013

[2] Dr Theng

[3] FAO (2011), Global Food Losses and Food Waste

[4] Based on OECD calculations. The OECD suggests that poverty be calculated using 50% of the country’s national median income. Using Malaysia’s national median income of RM3626 in 2012, the poverty line in Malaysia would be RM1813.

[5] State of Food Insecurity in the World, FAO (2013), downloadable from this link

[6] World Hunger Education Service (2013), retrieved on Nov 24 2013 from this link

[7] World Food Programme website, retreived on Nov 24 2013 from this link

[8] Causes of the 2007-2008 global food crisis identified, "Science for Environment Policy": European Commission DG Environment News Alert Service, edited by SCU, The University of the West of England, Bristol. (Downloadable by clicking here)

[9] If we planted trees on land currently used to grow unnecessary surplus and wasted food, this would offset a theoretical maximum of 100% of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion. c.f. Tristan Stuart's website

[10] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 1995. Climate Change: ScientificTechnical Report Analyses. In: Second Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panelon Climate Change. (Eds) Watson, R., Zinyowera, M. and Ross, R.), Cambridge: IPCC

[11] IPCC, 1995. See note [10]

[12] You can find a decent summary of the issues on this website