Food waste

[00:00.40] How much food do you buy each week?

[00:03.58] Are you someone who stuffs your fridge and cupboards full of edible treats so that you'll always have something to munch on and so that you'll never go hungry?

[00:14.21] Or maybe, like me, you're more efficient with your shopping, only buying what you need and using up your leftovers so that you keep food waste to a minimum.

[00:25.90] Throwing away unwanted food has become a big issue in the developed world.

[00:30.41] While some of us chuck away unwanted items, people in other parts of world face food shortages and are starving.

[00:38.11] It's a shocking fact that a third of the world's food is wasted each year.

[00:43.16] The actual figure is 1.3 billion tons of food, which is enough to feed a billion hungry people.

[00:50.86] You may think supermarkets are the main contributors to this mountain of food.

[00:55.11] After all, they do discard stuff that's past its sell-by-date and they often refuse to sell vegetables or fruit that are the wrong shape or look damaged.

[01:06.54] They've also been criticised for encouraging customers to buy more than they need through promotions such as 'buy one get one free'.

[01:15.83] But the biggest culprit for creating food waste is us.

[01:20.08] In Europe an incredible 53% of food waste comes from households, which results in 88 million tonnes of food waste a year.

[01:30.18] So instead of filling our bellies, our food is filling up landfill sites – it's buried and left to rot.

[01:37.88] Unfortunately this causes greenhouse gases which eventually leads to global warming and climate change.

[01:45.85] In Denmark, a woman called Selina Juul has been working hard to tackle this problem.

[01:51.96] She moved from Russia many years ago and was amazed to see the abundance of food available in the supermarkets.

[01:59.66] But despite so much availability, she found that people were buying more than they needed and throwing too much away.

[02:07.90] She convinced some supermarkets to stop selling their items in bulk so that people bought only what they needed.

[02:15.86] She produced a leftovers cookbook and she's now set up an education programme in schools.

[02:22.77] This has helped create a significant 25% reduction in food waste, which shows that something can be done.

[02:31.27] Clearly, we need to think twice when we put something in our shopping trolley, and when we're at home we should make the most of the food we have – using recipes that use up our leftovers or even sharing our excess food with our friends and neighbours.