Research and more research:

Talks: Food Waste symposium at NTU

It was great timing that the school actually put together a symposium on food waste last Wednesday that invited social enterprises over for a 3-hour talk to give audiences insights as well as a panel discussion.

It was a public lecture where I found the attendees to be PHD students, bioscience students or groups of students that were interested to tackle Food Waste as an FYP topic.

I looked forward to Ms Nichol Ng’s talk who is a co-founder of Food Bank. She projected some fascinating insights and figures of food donations her organization deals with:

 

• Two full lorries of onion rings were donated to them because 2 customers complained they found onion skins in them. Therefore, they can’t be sold
• The Food Bank received snacks in huge amount  because of minor packaging errors or because the product’s flavour was not selling too well.
• Supermarkets are able to return 90% of their items to the manufacturers. Therefore, its the manufacturers are the ones that are stuck with this food wastage
• Incineration is cheap in Singapore hence it is the easy way out. These incinerated food are perfectly edible but are being burnt because it is the easy way out – do not have to account for food waste

Also, during the Q&A session there was an angsty man that expressed his anger and kept questioning who were the ones that could change policies.

I found it rather funny as if the panel was able to answer that, there would not be food waste anymore.

Hence, it really got me to understand that for this issue to start improving, we have to start with ourselves.

Also I was glad that I managed to have a chat with the founder during the break and realize that the food Bank actually organized worked with artists and  organized art competitions. Hence, this serves some possibility of collaborating with them for the FYP

More research!

Documentaries: Channel News Asia – IT Figures on Food Waste

After watching a CNA documentary on how households overbuy, I decided to check out my own stash on the dining table.

 

Here’s what I found

 

And indeed, these were all expired.  I am feeling so guilty.

In just one container of items, there was already this amount of food waste, because of overbuying. Indeed the figure, 40% of food being produced is never eaten truly struck me.

Would you want to check out your kitchen right now?

 

Essentially, I would continue to think about what is the best way to get this figures presented to masses. Currently, it is to use its actual multitude to create a voice and show this ‘unseen’.

And on a leaving note, this issue of food waste is too infamous that even the number 1 top hit Shape of You has a parody version about food waste.