I have an acquaintance who often gets rigid over the fact that some people openly talk about food and some people openly have food during Ramadan. Being annoyed over people talking about food and having food is quite normal. He has every right to be bothered.
But what didn’t seem normal to me was seeing this person throwing away a box full of morog polao after having only three spoons of it. However, before that, he had had quite a lot of traditional iftar items. We asked him why he had wasted such a huge amount of food. He said he couldn’t assess his capacity to eat the morog polao after having had so many items.
The reason I mention this incident is because there are many like him who don’t realise that they won’t be able to eat so much, and ultimately waste what is on their plate. This is quite a common scenario in Bangladeshi gatherings, especially at wedding parties. A huge amount of food is seen to be wasted at the end of each party.
Let me give you some statistics. According to FAO, roughly one-third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year, approximately 1.3 billion tonnes, gets lost or wasted. Food loss and waste amounts to roughly $680 billion in industrialised countries, and $310bn in developing countries.
Bangladesh may be a poorer country, but the tendency of the people to waste food is no different. We waste food on an everyday basis. The best examples are perhaps wedding parties, iftars, and restaurants that offer buffets
Global quantitative food losses and waste per year is roughly 30% for cereals, 40% to 50% for root crops, fruits, and vegetables, 20% for oil seeds, meat, and dairy, plus 35% for fish.
Every year, consumers in rich countries waste almost as much food (222 million tonnes) as the entire net food production of Sub-Saharan Africa (230 million tonnes).
According to hoteliermiddleeast.com, nearly 3.27 million tonnes of food, worth more than $3.54bn, produced and imported in the UAE, is wasted every year.
Bangladesh may be a poorer country, but the tendency of the people to waste food is no different. We waste food on an everyday basis. The best examples are perhaps wedding parties, iftars, and restaurants that offer buffets. However, I haven’t yet seen any statistics on how much food is wasted across the country every year and what the impact is on the people in this regard.
I was a teenager during the 1970s, and saw a time in our country when food was scarce. I have seen how people used to put importance on the value of food at that time. I think we were much more cautious about saving food. The tendency to waste less came from the willingness to feed others. However, as the country prospered and the people became more affluent, the trend of wasting food got more intense.
One of the main reasons of food waste is leftovers. It happens because people prepare too much food for a certain number of people, or they take more than they can eat. On many occasions, some leftovers end up at the back of the fridge, but never get reused.
Sometimes, we cannot use our dairy, meat, and fish items which get wasted, as they don’t remain edible. When some food smells bad, looks bad, or tastes bad, we tend to throw them away. Food also gets wasted when someone prepares it badly. When there’s a change of plan to eat out as a family, our already-prepared food gets wasted.
As a nation, we have worked with many important issues and have become quite successful in many areas. However, the issue of wasting food has never gotten much importance in our lives. I also haven’t seen our politicians saying anything about this.
This could be a nice image-boosting campaign for any politician. If any leader adopts this campaign, he or she would gain a huge amount of respect among the citizens. At the same time, they would be doing this country of scarce resources a great favour.
To stop wasting food means to save food, and that means the saved food reaches the millions of Bangladeshis who have less access to food to feed themselves properly.
