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TS ELIOT may have called April the “cruellest month”, but for me it means the arrival of soup weather. I love making soup, from chunky vegetable to roast yellow pepper to Breton fish soup.
You can make a lot at once and freeze it, and it almost never flops (although I once experimented with a carrot and coriander soup that was way too heavy on the coriander – ever since then, I have to disguise the presence of coriander in a dish, or my husband balks).
Today I planned a soup based on a cabbage that turned out to have gone off, surprisingly, since cabbage is one of the last things to turn into slime and alien life-forms at the bottom of the produce drawer. So I hauled out an opened packet of shredded spinach. It was four days past the use-by date, but I sniffed it and washed it and it seemed fine, so in it went.
A week ago I might have tossed it. But I’ve been reading a really eye-opening book: American Wasteland, by Jonathan Bloom. Did you know that nearly 40% of food grown, reared or made in the USA is trashed? It’s an astonishing figure; it’s taken me days just to wrap my head around it. Forty percent!
But as I read chapter after chapter, I couldn’t help thinking how closely South Africa mirrors USA practices, at least in the retail sector. I started my journalism career at a trade magazine for the sector, and soon discovered that our supermarket pioneers had studied American chains intensively, bringing home their ideas.
And to this day, South African retail execs head overseas on exploratory trips regularly, coming back with plans to implement the latest trends. And many of those trends tend to grow the food waste problem.
One that popped up just before I started writing for the industry has grown and expanded wildly ever since: prepared fresh foods. Pillow packs of washed and ready to eat veggies (two minutes in the microwave); salad bowls with sachets of dressing; heat-and-eat three-veg-and-meat meals.
And this leads to huge amounts of food waste across the world: once a vegetable or fruit has been cut, it starts to oxidise, even if deterioration is delayed by the packaging, so a shredded lettuce must be tossed after a shorter period than a whole one.
Another trend that has taken hold in South Africa works on the psychology of the shopper: we love to see high piles of gleaming, colourful produce, so food has to be selected for its perfect colour and unblemished state – sorry, Joni Mitchell and “give me spots on my apples and leave me the birds and the bees”.
But oddly, this actually often results in us buying a poorer quality food. The best tomatoes aren’t the ones that are fat and round and withstand the rigours of travel well, as any home veggie gardener will tell you: the little ones that have ripened and even softened a bit on the vine burst with flavour and healthy phytochemicals like lycopene - the factor credited with protecting Italian men who eat tomatoes daily - from prostate cancer.
My suspicion about local food waste turned out to be true. I phoned the FoodBank’s fund development manager, Kate Hamilton, and asked her what percentage of South Africa’s food is wasted. “About a third of food suitable for human consumption goes to landfills,” she said. Gulp.
So we are very close to the USA – and while it’s upsetting enough there, since to many people’s surprise in the Land of the Free, one in six people go hungry, it’s unconscionable in South Africa.
Here, Hamilton tells me, 11 million people are ‘food insecure’ (for which read ‘hungry’). Oh, we produce enough food to feed everyone quite well – about 600g of starchy foods, 300g of veggies and fruit and 150g of meat and fish per person per day, according to the FoodBank.
But it’s not reaching the hungry.
That’s where programmes like the FoodBank come in. They ‘rescue’ perfectly good food within its expiry date that would otherwise be tossed for reasons that sometimes blow the mind. (The clerk punched in a wrong number on an order and now we have 30 pallets instead of 20, which we’ll never sell before expiry, would you believe?)
Then the FoodBank, through its warehouses around the country, supplies the food to 1 500 agencies (community-based), providing a total of 42 000 meals a day.
So here’s a challenge, dear readers: the FoodBank can’t (for obvious reasons) accept little individual donations of food from the general public (so we have to do better at not wasting food). But it can, and already does, ‘rescue’ food from some of the major retail chains.
If you are in food – farmer, caterer, distributor or retailer – make it a practice to donate any good food that would otherwise be wasted to the FoodBank or any other organisation in the same business that you may prefer.
Let’s not emulate the USA on this one thing; let’s not have the embarrassment of rising food waste stats while so many people in our country have empty tummies every day.
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own.
You can make a lot at once and freeze it, and it almost never flops (although I once experimented with a carrot and coriander soup that was way too heavy on the coriander – ever since then, I have to disguise the presence of coriander in a dish, or my husband balks).
Today I planned a soup based on a cabbage that turned out to have gone off, surprisingly, since cabbage is one of the last things to turn into slime and alien life-forms at the bottom of the produce drawer. So I hauled out an opened packet of shredded spinach. It was four days past the use-by date, but I sniffed it and washed it and it seemed fine, so in it went.
A week ago I might have tossed it. But I’ve been reading a really eye-opening book: American Wasteland, by Jonathan Bloom. Did you know that nearly 40% of food grown, reared or made in the USA is trashed? It’s an astonishing figure; it’s taken me days just to wrap my head around it. Forty percent!
But as I read chapter after chapter, I couldn’t help thinking how closely South Africa mirrors USA practices, at least in the retail sector. I started my journalism career at a trade magazine for the sector, and soon discovered that our supermarket pioneers had studied American chains intensively, bringing home their ideas.
And to this day, South African retail execs head overseas on exploratory trips regularly, coming back with plans to implement the latest trends. And many of those trends tend to grow the food waste problem.
One that popped up just before I started writing for the industry has grown and expanded wildly ever since: prepared fresh foods. Pillow packs of washed and ready to eat veggies (two minutes in the microwave); salad bowls with sachets of dressing; heat-and-eat three-veg-and-meat meals.
And this leads to huge amounts of food waste across the world: once a vegetable or fruit has been cut, it starts to oxidise, even if deterioration is delayed by the packaging, so a shredded lettuce must be tossed after a shorter period than a whole one.
Another trend that has taken hold in South Africa works on the psychology of the shopper: we love to see high piles of gleaming, colourful produce, so food has to be selected for its perfect colour and unblemished state – sorry, Joni Mitchell and “give me spots on my apples and leave me the birds and the bees”.
But oddly, this actually often results in us buying a poorer quality food. The best tomatoes aren’t the ones that are fat and round and withstand the rigours of travel well, as any home veggie gardener will tell you: the little ones that have ripened and even softened a bit on the vine burst with flavour and healthy phytochemicals like lycopene - the factor credited with protecting Italian men who eat tomatoes daily - from prostate cancer.
My suspicion about local food waste turned out to be true. I phoned the FoodBank’s fund development manager, Kate Hamilton, and asked her what percentage of South Africa’s food is wasted. “About a third of food suitable for human consumption goes to landfills,” she said. Gulp.
So we are very close to the USA – and while it’s upsetting enough there, since to many people’s surprise in the Land of the Free, one in six people go hungry, it’s unconscionable in South Africa.
Here, Hamilton tells me, 11 million people are ‘food insecure’ (for which read ‘hungry’). Oh, we produce enough food to feed everyone quite well – about 600g of starchy foods, 300g of veggies and fruit and 150g of meat and fish per person per day, according to the FoodBank.
But it’s not reaching the hungry.
That’s where programmes like the FoodBank come in. They ‘rescue’ perfectly good food within its expiry date that would otherwise be tossed for reasons that sometimes blow the mind. (The clerk punched in a wrong number on an order and now we have 30 pallets instead of 20, which we’ll never sell before expiry, would you believe?)
Then the FoodBank, through its warehouses around the country, supplies the food to 1 500 agencies (community-based), providing a total of 42 000 meals a day.
So here’s a challenge, dear readers: the FoodBank can’t (for obvious reasons) accept little individual donations of food from the general public (so we have to do better at not wasting food). But it can, and already does, ‘rescue’ food from some of the major retail chains.
If you are in food – farmer, caterer, distributor or retailer – make it a practice to donate any good food that would otherwise be wasted to the FoodBank or any other organisation in the same business that you may prefer.
Let’s not emulate the USA on this one thing; let’s not have the embarrassment of rising food waste stats while so many people in our country have empty tummies every day.
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own.
