More than 500 grams of good food in the garbage per day: every person from Como would throw away more than 534 grams of food per day. This is the quantity identified by the “International Observatory on Food and Sustainability” and it is a unit in line with the national trend, which rises up to 591 grams in the South. These are the data presented last February, regarding the our country, during the day dedicated to food waste. The analysis shows that waste is decreasing in Northern Italy, while it is growing in the South. Among the foods that are most thrown away even if they are still edible, we find, in order, eggs (+ 22%), ready-made sauces (+ 23%), cheeses (+ 21%), pre-cooked foods (20%), chocolate (+19%), and so on up to the waste of raw red meat (+ 5%) with the same percentage as fresh fruit. Less is wasted on breakfast products, flavorings, and cooked white meat.
Direct choices
According to the Observatory, which aims to provide the scientific community and public opinion with the knowledge and tools to analyze consumer behavior and the economic, environmental and social impacts generated by food waste, those who are most wasteful are the people without children, from the lower middle class (+17%) and the working class (+7%), who live in large cities (+8%), particularly in Southern Italy (+4%).
The objective of the Observatory is to generate useful knowledge to guide individual and political choices relating to the sustainable use of natural resources, the reduction and prevention of food waste and the promotion of healthy diets. The objective is also to investigate which solutions to develop and implement to counter it. Those proposed are reliable data, which however do not fail to raise some doubts, as also underlined by Monica Molteni who coordinates the operations of Siticibo in the Como area, which deals with finding surplus cooked and fresh food in large-scale retail trade and organized catering. to redistribute it to those who need it.
Conscious purchase
«Recovering resources from food waste has a double and important value, both to use food responsibly and to make a more conscious purchase of food. The data collected by the Observatory are in line with previous years: unfortunately we are faced with a very high figure. To carry out a more punctual collection of fresh food, which is expiring, Siticibo has expanded the sales points from which we supply. Instead of collecting a lot from a few places, lately we have been collecting a little from several retailers. This is because large-scale distribution has also implemented various virtuous strategies which reduce the number of surpluses dedicated to donation. We observe that this is a positive practice, but in addition to having less fresh food for the charitable structures we follow, the costs of recovering food also increase. We are therefore opening donations from companies that have backorders and inventories. Furthermore, we are trying to trigger on-call collections involving small businesses, such as schools and companies.”
