Food Waste: An interview with Dr. Kate Parizeau

We’ve talked quite a lot about climate-friendly diets lately, but reducing food waste is just as important, and in some modeling even more important, as a solution to climate change. It makes sense: producing most food generates greenhouse gas emissions across the supply chain, and when we waste food, those emissions are generated in the system without feeding anyone. Then when the food decays in the landfill, it generates even more emissions. The estimated impact of food waste is about 6% of total global emissions–around three times the amount attributed to all of aviation (Our World in Data)! 

There are so many reasons that food goes to waste, and we know that lots of dietitians work on this problem already, but we haven’t really dug into this topic yet. To get started, we sent some questions to Dr. Kate Parizeau, a researcher at the University of Guelph who studies food waste.

What first sparked your interest in food waste?

I’ve been interested in waste for a long time, because it is an issue that touches on both social justice and environmental justice. My research and community activities have focused on waste and waste management for over 20 years now. When I began working at the University of Guelph, I connected with others who were thinking about waste, and particularly food waste (including research partners at the City of Guelph and my colleagues Dr. Mike von Massow and Dr. Ralph Martin). The University of Guelph has a reputation as a leader in food research, and so this transition into food waste studies made a lot of sense for me.

Why do you think Canadians waste so much food relative to the rest of the world?

Canada is an affluent nation, and rich countries tend to consume more of everything. We tend to have an abundance mentality when it comes to food, and when this is combined with convenience culture and high levels of busy-ness in our everyday lives, food often ends up wasted. However, climate change and economic changes (such as inflation) require that we think differently about the resources that we use in Canada, both at a societal level and an individual level.

Are there aspects of food waste that you think are misunderstood by the public in Canada?

Most people in Canada are not aware of how much food waste we generate, because waste is often “out of sight and out of mind.” It has been estimated by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation that throughout the food value chain, Canada generates 396kg of food loss and waste per person per year. I think most of us don’t realize the scale of food waste, or the kinds of problems that it represents. When we throw away food that could have been eaten, we are wasting nutrients, we are wasting the land that was used to grow that food, we are wasting the inputs that helped to produce and transport that food (e.g. pesticides, fertilizers, water, fossil fuels), and we are wasting the efforts of the farmers and other workers who enabled us to receive that food.

Wasted food also contributes to climate change, both through the emissions associated with decomposing food waste, as well as the emissions generated throughout the agricultural sector to produce that uneaten food. Based on our research in Guelph, we’ve estimated that wasted food costs a household $936.52 per year, and represents an average of 3,366 wasted calories per week.

How much of the responsibility for reducing food waste is on supply chains versus individual households?

It is important to understand food waste as a systemic problem rather than simply the personal failure of individuals, while also targeting individual behaviour change: this is not an either/or situation. We need to transform our food systems to reduce food waste on farms, in processing plants, and at retail, and we also need to change our cultures of consumption and individual resource use behaviours. If for no other reason, encouraging individuals to understand and care about food waste helps to build an informed constituency who will call for government action on food waste, as well as thoughtful consumers who will choose to support food businesses that are working toward sustainability goals.

Do you think that getting rid of “best before” dates would be effective, and how prepared would Canadians be in terms of their food literacy (knowing when something needs to be thrown out for food safety reasons)?

Our research suggests that people do use best before dates as a source of information about food spoilage and food safety, even though these labelling practices are actually just a manufacturer’s suggestion for when their product will likely be at its best quality. Many Canadians do not have the food literacy to determine when food has truly spoiled (rather than just becoming unaesthetic), or to know which foods are dangerous to eat when they have gone off. For example, consumers need to be concerned about lunch meat that has spoiled, but a box of crackers beyond its best before date is unlikely to make someone ill. My concern is that removing best before dates might spur consumers to waste more food preemptively in the absence of food literacy. I think we need to transform best before date labels, ideally to a system that uses scientific information to inform consumers about when food actually becomes unhealthy to eat.

We’ve noticed many small-scale initiatives aimed at reducing food waste, and we’ve been thinking through their various pros and cons. Two that we’re interested in are Flashfood and FoodFund. Do you think things like food rescue and redistribution are valuable and worth trying to scale up?

Food rescue is an important activity for creating circular food systems: we need to find ways to redistribute edible food to eaters in high volumes. However, I think we should avoid creating or strengthening two-tier food systems where lower-quality rescued foods are diverted to food insecure people. Instead, all of us should be striving to eat edible food that is currently being wasted, and we should use policy tools to address income inequality that will allow all people to afford the foods that they choose to eat.

Are there any existing initiatives that you think would really have an impact on food waste?

I’m excited by the work that Our Food Future is doing in Guelph-Wellington to create a circular food system. This is a multi-stakeholder partnership that has created a number of initiatives to reduce food waste, support small food businesses, and increase access to affordable, nutritious foods. Love Food Hate Waste is also doing valuable work to change the culture of food wastage in Canada.

Thanks so much for your thoughtful responses on this topic! If you’d like to read more of Dr. Parizeau’s work, you can see some of her publications here, including a study looking at the impacts of the pandemic on food waste behaviours.

Happy Halloween everyone! See you next month,

Anneke